Best Practices Leveraging Computer-Aided Dispatch to Enhance Suspicious Activity Reporting

• NCJ Number: 309257
• Date Published: August 2022
• Length: 18 pages
• Grant Number(s): 2017-D6-BX-0001
• Publication Type: Best Practice/State-of-the-Art Review

Annotation

This guide was created to help law enforcement and fusion centers as they work to develop or enhance the process of querying Computer-Aided Dispatch data to derive or develop information, tips, leads, or suspicious activity.

Abstract

This document provides research-backed recommendations with the goal of helping agencies and fusion centers to establish a Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) query and integration process that enhances their Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) programs and subsequent analysis. The document explains how to use the tools and resources that law enforcement and fusion centers need in order to build CAD capabilities and offers examples of how centers and agencies can collaborate to exchange relevant information. The framework discussed in this guide can be adapted, scaled, and applied to a wide range of organizational models. The systems and models presented here are generic in nature so that they can serve as a starting point for a variety of entities as they work to build a functional SAR query process. The document discusses what information can be included in or derived from CAD data; core privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties protections; promising practices, including CAD as a stand-alone data source, and CAD as an integrated data source; as well as and opportunities and challenges for cross-jurisdictional data sharing, staffing needs, vendor selection and data ownership, and more.