state & local gov

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently visited Washington State to speak at the Worldwide Public Safety Symposium. While I was there, I also had the opportunity to tour the Washington State Fusion Center.

The Indian Country Section of the International Association of Chiefs of Police recently honored Lieutenant Yuma House of the Lower Brule Police Department in South Dakota as the 2011 Indian Country Law Enforcement Officer of the Year for the United States, First Nations, or Aboriginal Law Enforcement Officers.

I would like to congratulate my Senior Tribal Advisor Joe LaPorte for his recent re-election as Chair of the Indian Country Section of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP). We greatly value our work with IACP in information sharing, and Joe’s efforts to improve information sharing and access for tribal nations is critical to our success in building an Information Sharing Environment.

Many state law enforcement agencies do not offer a single sign-on, or Simplified Sign-On, for the many different law enforcement systems and databases their employees need. This makes using them cumbersome and often doubles, triples, or even quadruples investigators’ work. Fixing this, with what is often referred to as a federated identity model, can require costly IT investment and difficult legal and policy hurdles.

PM-ISE is excited to participate in the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI)’s January 25^th event, Shared Services across Government, which is now free for US government employees. This event will continue the important government and industry dialogue around information sharing services and standards from December’s Standards Palooza, or WIS3.

This morning, an esteemed panel testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on progress in information sharing since 9/11 (watch the recorded webcast here). Providing a non-federal perspective, this panel was well positioned to “tell it like it is.” 

Last week, ISE staff attended the Social Media and Law Enforcement conference (SMILE) in Dallas, TX. We learned a lot about the successes and challenges that our law enforcement mission partners are discovering as they use social media to share information with the public and each other. We also live tweeted from the conference and a trip to a Dallas Police Department information sharing center (see picture at right) on @shareandprotect.