The Butler County Sheriff’s Office will use state grant money to help improve a database used by local police departments.
Chief Deputy Mark Peffer says his office will use a $50,000 grant to fund programmatic updates to help two different records management systems work together.
“It basically helps increase data-sharing capabilities,” Peffer told the Butler County commissioners during a meeting Wednesday.
The updates will allow the system that’s currently used by the sheriff’s and district attorney’s offices called In-Synch to work with another system used by police departments locally and statewide.
That system is called LEJIS, or the Law Enforcement Justice Information System. It was created in 2012 by the Pennsylvania Counter Terrorism Task Force to establish a database where information can be uploaded and made accessible to law enforcement agencies for needed investigations.
“It helps share information related to things like warrant pursuits, contact with witnesses, missing people,” Peffer said. “Currently, over 30 percent of existing law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania use LEJIS or submit data to LEJIS.”
The updates should create a new data-sharing interface between the In-Synch records management system used by law enforcement agencies in Butler County, with the established Law Enforcement Justice Information System, enabling efficient and easy access to shared information.
