Police departments have been inundated with data, often siloed in fragmented systems. In recent years, police departments have responded to new and varied challenges with new technologies, from body-worn cameras to automated license plate readers.

Computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and record management systems (RMS) have been used by law enforcement departments for more than 30 years, but they’ve evolved over time – software has come a long way since the 1990s.

So, while a decision about the best tool in 2009, or even 2018, might have made sense then, it’s exceedingly likely there’s something better on the market today. The result? Most police departments have gone (or will go) through an RMS or CAD transition – but it’s a process fraught with risk.

In 2019, the Green Bay police department struggled with the implementation and deployment of a new, $1.2M computer-aided dispatch system (CAD). The police chief said "It's definitely impacting our ability to do our jobs. . . Our hardest workers, the real go-getters out there, are the ones least satisfied" with the system change.

We have some advice on how to avoid common deployment pitfalls for technologies of all stripes here.

Here are 4 things you should know before you upgrade your CAD or RMS system.

Data structures are different for every system

CAD and RMS providers are competitors with one another, and each system has a unique data structure. A data structure is how information is organized in a system. CAD and RMS systems are filled with data objects, like people, places, and things, which each have a collection of attributes. For example, a car is an object with make, model, year, color, and more.

How one system defines “car” is different than how another might do it. That makes transitioning data from one system to another nigh impossible unless a competitor is intimately familiar with the other’s data structure or has built specific tooling designed to integrate data. Ask about this before you pick a vendor.

Scope the data transition

The vast majority of the time, data migration from one CAD or RMS system to another will be completely out of scope. Make sure you understand what each vendor will or won’t do when it comes to integrating and transitioning data.

Some vendors will move data from one system to another for fees to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars (or more). It’s vital to know what your data stack will look like before you purchase a piece of technology – and that includes where your data will live.

Data transitions made hard

If you do choose to pay for data migration, be aware of duplicate records. It’s good to have one place to search all person records – but if there are duplicates, there are problems. When an investigator searches for a person and sees 40 records, it’s hard to know which one will have the data they need so they have to open all of them to be sure. Similarly, the fragmentation makes it harder to find all records related to a single Person.

We’ve experienced this first-hand with Hyundai vehicles. A merged data set had – without exaggeration – dozens of spellings of the word Hyundai. The same vehicle could have multiple records due to multiple spellings.

If you choose to pay the fee, be sure to ask vendors how many entities they can merge for de-duplication at one time. We also recommend asking them how long it will take them to fully de-duplicate your CAD or RMS data sets.

Be aware of tech debt

Most police departments we talk to opt not to pay prohibitively expensive fees to vendors for data migration from one CAD or RMS to another. That means, even when new data isn’t being added to a legacy system, the legacy system remains in use.

In practice, investigators are looking for suspects and known associates across two or more systems that all work differently, with different logins. Analysts do the same when manually collecting the data they need to build reports for executive leadership to make decisions.

The tech debt, rather than creating a financial burden in the forms of fees to vendors, is a personnel burden. It’s frustrating. It makes the basics of everyone’s job orders of magnitude harder. In solving one problem – upgrading legacy technology – police departments create another in the form of disparate systems personnel have to wrangle.

Peregrine’s data integration tooling

Peregrine’s back-end technology was purpose-built to solve this problem. We can integrate data of any type or scale from any vendor into our platform.

Our technology has two key phases:

1. Connect and integrate: We centralize data of any type or scale from a variety of sources, while embedding robust security and permission models to protect it.

2. Enrich and organize: We use machine-driven methods to enhance raw data and apply logic that links people, places, events, and more.

Data across multiple RMS or CAD systems are harmonized into a common operating picture within Peregrine. John A. Smith is John A. Smith is John A. Smith. If an investigator searches for a suspect, Peregrine’s universal Search application identifies relevant individuals from all integrated systems. An analyst need only access Peregrine to collate the data they need into dynamic Maps or Dashboards so executive leadership has the latest crime stats in real time.

As part of Peregrine’s back-end technology, we’ve developed novel methods for resolving duplicates. When you encounter a merged entity – say, a person record, like John A. Smith – in the platform, you’ll see an orange badge on it. It’s easy to see how many entities were merged into the new record, and authorized users can un-merge the entities if needed.

In other words, Peregrine eliminates tech debt and makes duplicate records a thing of the past. Our platform means law enforcement’s jobs become easier and more efficient – so everyone in a department, from leadership to patrol officers and everyone in between can better serve their communities.

Planning to attend IACP 2024? Visit Peregrine at Booth #1171.