Virginia Beach, United States. The Virginia Beach Police Department is using Peregrine Technologies to consolidate information from its existing systems as it operates with 100 officer vacancies and 25 unfilled professional staff positions. The department says the platform is intended to reduce time spent searching disconnected records systems.
Consolidating department records
Peregrine Technologies provides a platform that brings together agency-held data, connects and contextualises information, and makes it searchable in one place.
Police technology administrator Brandon Kyle said information across the department has traditionally been held in systems that do not communicate with each other.
“Oftentimes we have sources of information across the police department that traditionally do not talk to each other,” Kyle said. “The purpose of Peregrine is to break down some of those data silos and make connections for our detectives, investigators, analysts, and allow them to search it almost like you would search Google.”
Kyle said the platform combines 19 million records from the department’s systems, including computer-aided dispatch records and body-worn camera footage.
Efficiency amid vacancies
The department said investigators can use a single query rather than manually searching several systems through separate logins. Kyle said the tool has saved time and surfaced information that might otherwise not have been found.
“A lot of time has been saved, a lot of return on investment, finding information that would never have been surfaced before,” he said. “We continue to see those successes just in the short time that we have been using it.”
With 100 fewer officers than budgeted, the department could not add staff to match its workload, Kyle said.
“It really amplifies our need to become more efficient with the way that we’re processing our information, and that’s what Peregrine allows us to do,” he said.
Access controls
Peregrine Technologies says it does not collect, create or sell data. The company says it works with records already held by an agency and enables authorised users to find information more quickly.
Kyle said the platform applies each organisation’s existing permissions, allowing users to access only records they are already authorised to view. He said the system does not access social media or purchase data from brokers, and is limited to records generated by the department in its work.
