About 70 sheriffs around the state could soon have shared access to one another's criminal and civil records, a move expected to reduce overhead costs and help investigators solve crimes quicker.
A proposal to create a statewide database of shared records managed by a Sheriff's Cooperative Authority stalled in the General Assembly this year. However, some local sheriffs who supported the failed bill are working toward a similar goal with a private vendor, said Putnam County Sheriff Howard Sills, who also served as legislative chairman for the Georgia Sheriffs' Association.
"We're taking off and running with it," Sills said. "If you want to get on the train, hey, we'll welcome you."
Eagle Advantage Solutions, a software vendor based in Carrollton, is already providing jail and records management systems for sheriff's offices in about 70 counties, primarily in more rural areas such as Baldwin, Putnam and Walker counties, Sills said. The plan for the first phase of the project is to push the data from those counties to a single server accessible to all.
An initial version of the software is expected to debut next month.
The company declined to provide a full list of the sheriff's departments that would be part of the project.
"Due to privacy reasons, and to protect our proprietary information, it is not our policy to divulge the names of our customers without their prior consent," the company's vice president for customer services, Cindy Davison, said in an email.
The sheriff's offices in DeKalb, Fulton, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties will not be participating, at least not initially, Sills said. He said those agencies were faster to computerize their records, so they have long ago developed their own data management system.
After the project gets off the ground, though, even the counties who don't work with Eagle Advantage Solutions now may be offered a way to upload their records and access other sheriffs' records, Davison said.
Providing access to civil and criminal records such as arrest warrants, jail booking sheets, incident reports, and subpoenas should be a boon to local investigators. It would save records clerks from mailing arrest warrants to other agencies around the state, and save investigators from driving to another sheriff's office to retrieve an incident report. Those records would soon be viewable and printable online for participating agencies.
Investigators also will be able to see who is being held in another county's jail and pull mug shots of them to do a photo lineup with crime victims.
"So it saves a lot of time and money for that agency," Davison said.
One important component of the failed Senate bill that will not be available with the new system is public access to the sheriffs' records. The initial plan was for sheriffs' records such as incident reports, jail booking records and arrest warrants, which are already subject to the state's Open Records law, to be accessible to people online for a fee.
The Eagle Advantage Solutions information-sharing system would not be available to the public. The sheriffs' records would be stored in a secure database that only law enforcement could see, Davison said.
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