Building an Infrastructure for Law Enforcement Information Sharing and Collaboration: Design Issues and Challenges

With the exponential growth of the Internet, information can be shared among government agencies more easily than before. However, this also poses some design issues and challenges. This article reports on our experience in building an infrastructure for information sharing and collaboration in the law enforcement domain. Based on our user requirement studies with the Tucson Police Department, three main design challenges are identified and discussed in details. Based on our findings, we propose an infrastructure to address these issues. The proposed design consists of three modules, namely (1) Security and Confidentiality Management Module, (2) Information Access and Monitoring Module, and (3) Collaboration Module. A prototype system will be deployed and tested at the Tucson Police Department. We anticipate that our studies can potentially provide useful insight to other digital government research projects.