Police share information through a new database

Chief J. Thomas Manger of the Montgomery County Police, which had already adopted the LInX system, said a recent home invasion robbery demonstrated how useful it could be: Police caught two of the men, but a third escaped. A check of the records of the pair’s criminal records in Shenandoah County, Va., turned up a report mentioning a third associate. That helped detectives track down information that led to the third man’s arrest.

The information would have been available to detectives before, but would have required them to know where to look for it and take lots of ‘‘legwork” to find it, Manger said.

‘‘We are as excited about LInX as we were about DNA and automated fingerprints,” said Arlington (Va.) Police Chief M. Douglas Scott, who serves on LInX’s regional governance board.

The Naval Criminal Investigation Service, a federal civilian law enforcement agency attached to the Navy, developed LInX.

In 2005, NCIS approached the Metropolitan Council of Governments to see if there was interest in the police departments joining LInX, said Manger, who is chairman of COG’s police chiefs committee. COG is made up of 21 local governments in the Washington region that work on regional cooperation.

NCIS saw the need for the program for two reasons, said Special Agent in Charge Michael Dorsey. One was a response to the criticism from the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which pointed to the lack of communication between police departments as allowing the terrorists to operate in the ‘‘seams,” he said. NCIS is charged with protecting the security of Navy bases.

The other reason was that NCIS is also charged with protecting sailors and their families on shore and one of the best ways to do that is to work with local law enforcement, Dorsey said.

The Washington region is the seventh in the country to roll out the LInX system. Other areas include the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, the Pacific Northwest and New Mexico, where the Navy has personnel at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he said.

‘‘We need to know what our local counterparts know,” Dorsey said. ‘‘They need to know what we know.”

While the Department of Justice has discussed rolling out a national system similar to LInX, those plans have not gotten off the ground, said Thomas Betro, director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

As a smaller agency, he said, NCIS has been able to roll out a system more quickly.

The $2.7 million system was paid for with grants from the departments of Defense and Justice. Local law enforcement agencies do not have any costs in accessing the system.

Their crime reports, field interrogation reports, traffic tickets, and mug shots are sent to a regional database at a Department of Justice facility in Greenbelt.

Police can then access the data through a secure Web site and type in search terms into an analytical system that matches the query with reports from other departments.

While some departments such as Montgomery County Police have been using the system since this summer, NCIS officials expect at least 65 departments to be on the system by the end of the year.

Prince George’s County Police Assistant Chief Darrin Palmer said his department recently connected to LInX.

‘‘It’s phenomenal,” he said. ‘‘It really brings together all the analytical tools needed. It still involves good police work to know what to search for. But it takes a lot of the leg work out of it.”

National and state ACLU officials said they did not know much about the system.

‘‘Nobody objects to the idea of law enforcement getting better at sharing legitimate law enforcement information,” said Jay Stanley, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Technology and Liberty Project.

While the program would not violate the federal Posse Comitatus Act prohibiting the military from being used for local law enforcement, it does raise questions, he said.

‘‘Anytime the military gets involved in domestic law enforcement, it should make Americans wary,” Stanley said.

Police historically have been protective of sharing their data, said Charles County Sheriff’s Capt. Dave Saunders, but the only information that would be shared among departments is information they would already be allowed to share. ‘‘It doesn’t allow them anything they don’t have access to now.”

In the age of Google and other search engines, a new generation of police wants to find information quickly to help them solve crimes, Saunders said. ‘‘This allows instantaneous access.”