NCJ Number
188707
Journal
Police Chief Volume: 68 Issue: 5 Dated: May 2001 Pages: 14-16
Date Published
May 2001
Length
2 pages
Annotation
In the summer of 1999, the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center-Southeast Region (NLECTC-SE) joined with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to bring together a group of law enforcement and education practitioners to discuss school safety technology; this article reports on the outcome of that discussion.
Abstract
The group recommended devising a way to facilitate the secure and timely sharing of information among the police, courts, and schools regarding potentially dangerous events and individuals. In response, the NLECTC-SE developed and installed a virtual private network that links several schools, law enforcement organizations, and juvenile justice agencies in the Bloomington-Normal, Ill, area. Further, the Office of Science and Technology (OS&T) of the U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice, the parent organization of the NLECTC-SE, had several grants and research projects posted online for the design and development of pertinent technologies. These included a personal distress device for school personnel; simulation technologies for school safety training; a voice-to-voice English to Spanish (and reverse) translation software, with added capability of capturing voice interactions to electronic forms; an assessment of the applicability of less-than-lethal weapons for school; and non-intrusive drug detection. The OS&T also has established at the U.S. Department of Energy's Sandia Labs in New Mexico a school security technology center to adapt technologies developed for nuclear security to use in school security. Further, OS&T has school safety technology projects in progress in the area of concealed weapons detection, sensor technologies, and voice and data interoperability.