Scattered across the country are more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies—local, state, tribal, and federal—each going about their business of gathering clues, conducting interviews, solving crimes, and generating reports and information.
So the question is: in an age where many crimes cross one or more jurisdictions, how can agencies share their information with each other…not only to catch criminals and terrorists but also to spot crime trends and patterns and help prevent attacks?
After all, beyond a few national criminal justice systems like the National Crime Information Center and the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, most information-sharing between police agencies is on a case-by-case basis or through local and regional information systems.
That’s now changing, thanks to the Law Enforcement National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Details
