CriMNet to link 1,100 databases

CriMNet will be search engine for information

By RON LARSEN

Journal Staff Writer

NEW ULM -- With potential terrorists walking in our midst, the fear of violent criminals slipping through the cracks in the state's criminal justice system has never been greater.

Enter CriMNet, the technological caulking gun being designed to seal those gaping cracks for good. When fully developed, up and running, the secure intranet system will link Minnesota's 1,100 criminal justice jurisdictions through the use of common business practices and a standard computer language.

CriMNet Deputy Director Tom Kooy and the firm's director of communications, Mahogany Eller,visited New Ulm last week as part of an out-state tour to explain the program to law enforcement agencies and news media.

"We're talking to law enforcement agencies to help them in understanding what CriMNet is, giving them some idea of time lines, the things they need to be thinking about, and preparing them for some motivation about why they are going to want to be involved and get connected to this," Kooy explained.

"But we're also here to just start to propagate some community understanding about what the project is, what the investment is, and why it's needed."

Kooy said TV shows and Hollywood movies have led people to believe that the data is already out there -- which is true -- but there's also the idea that you can take a driver's license and swipe the mag stripe on a machine and bring back every piece of data that's known about an individual. His current address, criminal history and everything down to speeding tickets, and, naturally, it will be delivered right to the computer desktop.

"Nothing is further from the truth, and yet criminal justice professionals every day have to make decisions based upon what information they do have," Kooy explained. "It's usually only a fragment of people's accurate criminal history."

CriMNet isn't about compiling a vast, central database to serve the needs of the state's criminal justice system.

"CriMNet will act like a search engine, pulling information from the various existing databases," Kooy said. "With roughly 1,100 different criminal justice databases in Minnesota alone, trying to dynamically build a redundant database on top of all that just doesn't work, but it is always what has been done, usually within lines of business."

Whether it be local police reports, state police, court reports or corrections reports, they all have reporting mechanisms, Kooy explained. However, the problem is, in accessing these reports, that they aren't in the same form or a compatible computer language.

"So, while you may be able to access the information, it may not be in the proper order so it doesn't make sense. So being able to effectively access these various databases and being able to pull out the right information is the big challenge."

While there are some individual functions that are now available to agencies, there's a lot of work left to be done on the program's central function, that of searching 1,100 different databases for pertinent information, Kooy explained.

However, Kooy and the other staff members of CriMNet are pleased with the progress thus far.

"We've had inquiries from surrounding states in the Midwest, including Illinois, wanting to know more about our system, and we've received inquiries from the Justice Department about the possibility of our program becoming a national model."

It's not an inexpensive project, either. With funding coming from federal and state sources, the price tag is expected to be $50 million or more.

"It's an immense undertaking," Kooy said. "Harnessing over 1,100 individual databases and establishing a connection between them, with a common computer language, so the resulting information pulled from them is understandable is not an easy job.

"They have to be connected in such a way that all of the data, regardless of how it's being collected and stored today in the different data bases, different technologies, different data structures, relational, non-relational databases that we can commonize so you can share and view them all in one way.

"With different accessibilities, we've got to deal with connecting. They've got to be able to pull, push the information so there are some infrastructural issues that we have to commonize so that all this data can move."

All in all, CriMNet will be a great tool for law enforcement agencies when it's done, but Kooy admits that it's a long way from being fully operational.