COPLINK helping catch more bad guys

By Susan Thornton
Article Last Updated: 03/05/2008 08:41:43 PM MST

Bad guys, beware.

Colorado law enforcement officials are in the process of implementing COPLINK, a "quantum leap" for police efforts across the state, according to Aurora Police Chief Daniel Oates.

COPLINK is commercially developed software that accepts data from multiple police and sheriff's departments and links it seamlessly to give law enforcement a huge boost in getting criminals off the street.

Parts of the software program have been used since 2006 in Jefferson County, Arvada, Lakewood, Westminster, Golden, Wheat Ridge and Broomfield. Now, they and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation and law enforcement agencies in Aurora, Denver, Grand Junction/Mesa County, and Douglas, Adams and Arapahoe counties have come together to implement all of the modules in the software.

The consortium of agencies paid $1.2 million (half of it from federal grants) to cover COPLINK's licensing fee. Each participating agency will be responsible for the cost of merging its own data into the COPLINK software, and annual operating costs will be shared among agencies. (On Friday, Congressman Ed Perlmutter and Sens. Ken Salazar and Wayne Allard will present a check for $587,000 to help Adams County and the cities of Thornton, Northglenn, Commerce City and Brighton install COPLINK.)

Oates explains that COPLINK is much easier to use than a typical records- management system. For example, officers may respond to a robbery in Aurora involving two men. If they arrest "bad guy No. 1," COPLINK may show them that he was stopped earlier in another jurisdiction with "bad guy No. 2."

COPLINK can tell police who the first suspect called from jail, his last known address, his phone number and partial license plate, where he hangs out, and his arrest record.

A simple query can yield dozens of possible leads, Oates says. While it might take a detective two weeks to get a lead in a robbery, COPLINK can result in a lead in as little as an afternoon.

Oates points out that most of the data loaded into COPLINK by participating jurisdictions is from official police records, which become public information following an arrest.

However, COPLINK also stores some intelligence data that is speculative and does not derive from arrests. That might be more problematic for civil libertarians, but Oates says the information entered must meet federal guidelines on privacy as well as a "whole body of law" that governs federally funded data systems.

Oates believes that the word about COPLINK's effectiveness will "spread like wildfire" among Colorado detectives, crime analysts and officers, and that other policing agencies across the state will want to join the consortium as soon as possible.

Each of the police chiefs and sheriffs who have put aside egos and jurisdictional differences to implement the computerized data-sharing system deserve a vote of thanks from the law-abiding citizens of the metro area.