Orange County Sheriff’s Department: Unifying 30+ systems, modernizing tech with Peregrine on AWS

This story was authored by Amazon Web Services (AWS) staff in partnership with Peregrine.

• 30+ disparate systems unified for a single source of truth

• 3-week or longer response times replaced with real-time data access

• 30-year-old on-premises technology modernized

• Real-time access to critical information enables faster, more informed decisions agency-wide

ORANGE COUNTY, Calif. — The Orange County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) serves one of the most populous counties in California. Its Technology Division supports all aspects of the organization’s operations, from communications and dispatch to records management and evidence tracking, ensuring critical data and resources are accessible. With decades-old technology and numerous siloed software systems — each with its own dataset — the department sought to modernize its approach with cloud-based solutions. OCSD onboarded Peregrine, an AWS Partner, and leveraged its real-time decision and operations management platform on AWS GovCloud (US) to integrate information from over 30 disparate systems into a unified, data-driven network. This transformation enables the department to make faster, more informed decisions, creating a model for using innovation to drive public safety.

Opportunity: Struggling to meet modern demands with outdated technology and data silos

California’s OCSD is one of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States, serving 3.2 million residents with about 4,000 employees. However, OCSD’s outdated technology presented significant challenges, with systems dating back over 30 years. These legacy systems — including jail management, crime data, arrest records, warrants, parole data, reports from field operations, evidence tracking, training records, and other personnel data — were spread across on-premises architectures and even paper records that could not support the modern demands of law enforcement. “In terms of our technology, we were wearing our 1970s leisure suit to a disco ball,” said Dave Fontneau, chief information officer at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The organization’s decentralized approach created data silos and delays, limiting the agency’s ability to efficiently access and act on critical information. Without a single source of harmonized data across the agency, the Technology Division struggled to meet end user requests. “We get a lot of requests for data that has to be pulled from multiple divisions,” said Joe Giese, assistant director of IT at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “For example, policymakers may ask for reoffend rates with specific parameters, or the resource planning team may need to know how much criminal activity there is in an area based on certain conditions. They may need to overlay crime trends with prisoner data. In our previous system, we would spend three weeks or more trying to pull together and correlate data needed to answer questions accurately. We needed to pull all the datasets together and provide a unified, single pane of glass to our end users.”

The need for a unified solution became more pressing in 2021 when the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) pushed law enforcement agencies to adopt the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), which revised how crime data is categorized and collected the United States. “It was time for us to transform our technology in order to change the way we interacted in our organization, across Orange County, and beyond,” said Fontneau. “And recognizing that artificial intelligence and machine learning will evolve policing in the coming years, our technology needed to be primed and ready.”

Solution: A complete modernization anchored in real-time data integration and collaboration

OCSD set out to digitally transform its technology and create a next-generation technology and operations center for public safety in the county, including a key component for centralized data access and analysis. “We weren’t just looking for one piece of technology. We were looking for a partner that shared our values and vision of how innovation and collaboration could improve public safety,” said Fontneau. “And the partner needed to be agile enough to continue innovating with us as we created a technology framework that would work for use cases that don’t even exist yet.”

Recognizing the capabilities and shared vision of AWS Partner Peregrine, a public safety technology company, OCSD selected the technology firm’s platform for real-time decision and operations management. By sitting on top of disparate data sources and harmonizing the data into a single system, Peregrine’s platform offers the flexibility and integration capabilities OCSD needed to make its data more meaningful and useful. Peregrine’s status in the AWS Public Safety Competency, AWS Government Competency, and AWS Smart City Competency programs reinforced OCSD’s decision. “The AWS competency badges have helped accelerate our growth by bringing the credibility of AWS to our company. Our customers see this third-party validation and know they can trust us to deliver the security, scalability, and modern technology they need,” said Matt Melton, head of business development and partnerships at Peregrine.

Peregrine runs on several Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions including AWS GovCloud (US), the leading regulated industry cloud solution for sensitive data on a secure, scalable, and resilient architecture. “One of the reasons we built Peregrine on AWS is because its approach to compliance is better for our solution and law enforcement. Its principle of least privilege and the way even the cloud provider’s own staff is locked out of customer data make compliance much easier. That’s one of the reasons that AWS has become the provider of choice for the public safety technology ecosystem,” explained Melton. The platform also relies on Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to ensure reliable and scalable database management, essential for handling sensitive government data. Additionally, Peregrine utilizes Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for flexible computing power and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object storage and secure data backup and archiving, facilitating efficient operations and robust data protection.

Outcome: Real-time access to unified data establishes a new standard in public safety

With the launch of Peregrine, OCSD retired its 30-year-old technology and unified data from over 30 systems, making it accessible through a single, intuitive interface with appropriate permissions. Peregrine’s platform enables OCSD to quickly access, analyze, and act on critical information, facilitating faster, more informed decision-making across the organization. Information requests that once took three weeks to address are now streamlined through real-time data access.

OCSD has become a model for how law enforcement agencies can use modern technology to improve public safety. The department’s new Technology and Operations Center serves as a collaborative hub, where employees gather to make data-driven decisions that directly impact public safety. One notable improvement is in response times to critical “priority one” calls. OCSD has long tracked response times but previously struggled to understand why some areas experienced longer waits. With Peregrine, OCSD can now analyze the underlying factors affecting response times. “We used actionable insights from Peregrine to identify the need for satellite staging locations for deputies so they could reach the scene faster,” said Giese. This data-driven approach has led to faster response times and better public service.

Enhanced access to real-time data has also improved resource planning, enabling OCSD to adjust staffing levels by analyzing crime patterns alongside data from custody records. This proactive approach helps the department prepare for shifts in public safety needs across the 13 cities and unincorporated areas it serves. In addition, training processes have improved as digital systems can better measure the readiness of a new officer before moving to the more resource-intensive in-field training. Reports are now easier to generate and more consistent across the organization, with employees pulling from the same dataset and using streamlined reporting formats. “Our chiefs of police do not need to be data experts to use our technology. We want our leadership to be able to grab a laptop, set a date range, walk into a meeting, and pull up accurate information presented in a meaningful way. Peregrine lets us do that,” said Fontneau. “There is a direct nexus between leadership and innovation, and Peregrine plays a significant role in our ability to continually innovate to improve service across our organization, enhance collaboration with external partners, and ultimately create a safer community for our residents.”

About the customer: Orange County Sheriff’s Department

The Orange County Sheriff’s Department is the primary law enforcement agency for Orange County, California. With about 4,000 employees, the agency is focused on intelligence-led policing strategies and a community-oriented approach to serving its 3.2 million residents.