POTTSTOWN, Pa., Jan. 26, 2018 /PRNewswire-iReach/
CODY Systems announces that 45 police departments across Montgomery and Bucks Counties in Pennsylvania are now sharing cross-county police records data in real-time through its scalable COBRA.net data-sharing system hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) GovCloud. This system is now sharing police records data from agencies across both counties that use different vendors' records management systems (RMS), including 9 agencies in Bucks and 12 agencies in Montgomery County that are CODY RMS customers.
"Over a year ago, the county offered us the option to join a countywide records management system, but my agency, like many others, declined the offer in favor of our current RMS company who we had trusted for years," said Chief Matthew Stofflet of West Pottsgrove Police Department in Montgomery County, CODY RMS customer since 1998. "While my department has no intention of ever leaving our CODY RMS, bringing COBRA.net to Montgomery County made our investment in CODY that much more valuable. Now, CODY RMS agencies and agencies like Lower Merion, who use a different RMS, are sharing data across the county in real time. Plus, since we joined with Bucks County, we get to share data with them as well."
Up until now, Montgomery County agencies were isolated and not able to share data with their neighboring agencies, let alone across adjacent counties. "Obviously, this has been a huge problem for us," said Chief John Livingood of Abington Police Department, CODY RMS customer since 2007. "With my upcoming retirement, I am thrilled to see this initiative taking off with such success at the end of my tenure as Chief. By joining the existing COBRA.net system in the AWS cloud, PA agencies are now able to share data in real-time while also leveraging the CJIS-compliant COBRA.net/AWS GovCloud infrastructure with all the stability and security that it provides. It's a win-win."
Lower Merion Police Department, the largest municipality in Montgomery County, notes the strategic value of the data available in COBRA.net in terms of both cost-savings and operational efficiency and productivity boosts it lends the agency. "We know from experience that our routine field investigations and complicated criminal investigations often lead us to these surrounding jurisdictions," said Michael McGrath, Superintendent of Police for Lower Merion PD, an agency participating in the project that uses a different RMS system. "Leveraging data and technology such as this helps us offset overall costs by multiplying the productivity and output of our current staff. At the same time, we potentially provide freed up time to address the added demands for community policing and outreach. The true value of this asset, in law enforcement capabilities, far exceeds the costs."
"Since we started using COBRA.net," said Chief Stofflet, "my officers are safer on the streets and my investigators have closed cases that we never would have solved otherwise."
Leveraging the latest in semantic full-text search and big data indexing technology, COBRA.net provides one-stop and blazing fast search to law enforcement sharing networks, fusion centers, anti-fraud units and others, via its C.tac App (browser, iOS, android). Hundreds of millions of structured records and unstructured data content is shared via COBRA.net, including cross-vendor RMS, CAD, JMS, LPR, warrants, citations, incarceration status, case reports, SARs, offender call logs, sensor data, PDFs, Word Documents, Excel files and other data sources across the criminal justice landscape.
Among the 800+ agencies and thousands of users connected through COBRA.net across the country, this growing COBRA.net data-sharing network in eastern PA is poised to nearly double in size over the next 6-12 months as additional agencies in the state come on-board. Then, in the next phase of growth, all COBRA.net nodes across the country are staged to be linked together in one massive SuperCOBRA Data-sharing system which will truly be the first and only nationwide, cross-vendor, real-time crime data-sharing network, presently sharing over 200 million records.
Click here to learn more about the COBRA.net technology platform.
http://www.codysystems.com/cobra-net-data-exchange
Media Contact: Maggie Riker, CODY Systems, 6103267476, mriker@codysystems.com
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SOURCE CODY Systems