MCP Supports Illinois County’s Public-Safety and Justice Data-Infrastructure Upgrade

Background

McClean County is in central Illinois. It is the state’s largest county in terms of area and has a population of about 171,000. The county seat is Bloomington, which is best known as the corporate headquarters of State Farm Insurance, while the adjacent city of Normal is home to Illinois State University.

The county's law-enforcement/justice ecosystem long has relied on an aging but well-integrated data infrastructure that was implemented in the 1990s. This infrastructure encompasses law-enforcement records-management, courts case-management, jail-management, and document-management systems. While offering seamless data sharing across numerous public-safety and justice organizations, the infrastructure suffered from significant limitations, including outdated technology, fundamental security gaps, and a lack of adaptability to modern requirements.

The county selected Mission Critical Partners to lead a project that would holistically plan an upgrade for these systems and address their limitations.

The Challenges

The infrastructure's foundational architecture presented critical potential security and privacy vulnerabilities. Access to the single combined database automatically granted access to all information, meaning that sensitive police, court, probation, prosecutor, and public-defender records could be seen by persons not authorized to view that information. The vulnerabilities made the infrastructure unfit for continued long-term use given today’s security requirements.

In addition, several issues concerning data management existed, including:

• Search capabilities — Users were required to know exact processes to locate records, as the system lacked modern search functionality. This deficiency made investigative work cumbersome and time-consuming due to the need to run many different searches for information.
• Manual data entry —The system relied heavily on manual inputs for case creation and updates. While staff members had become proficient with these processes, they were inherently inefficient compared with modern, automated tools.
• Process silos — Despite its well-integrated design, the aging infrastructure began to create operational silos; for example, newer reporting requirements such as those pertaining to health and service trends added layers of complexity that had to be run outside of the legacy systems.

Several challenges existed pertaining to a migration to new infrastructure. One was that the organizations that need to leverage the system — the city and university police departments and the county court organizations and jail systems — had diverse needs. Law-enforcement records-management systems are event-based and focused on responding to incidents, making arrests, and managing reports centered around events. Meanwhile, court organizations operate on a case-based model, often managing multiple cases for an individual concurrently. This case-centric approach conflicted with the event-centric nature of the law-enforcement system. Finally, the jail system introduced yet another layer of complexity with its person-based focus on individuals’ custody and rehabilitation processes.

Another was that McLean County, as a smaller jurisdiction, faced financial and staffing constraints that further complicated its ability to address these challenges. Specifically, the county lacked the resources needed to custom-build a new integrated infrastructure, a process that could take upwards of six years and substantial funding. Off-the-shelf solutions for individual records-management, case-management, and jail-management systems exist, but they are not inherently integrated. Consequently, replicating the seamless data-sharing capabilities of the legacy infrastructure would require additional investment in middleware and integration efforts.

The fact that no modern equivalent was available on the market meant that replacing the legacy infrastructure would result in siloed systems that weren’t integrated at all — a huge departure from the past — resulting in disruption of established workflows and data-sharing capabilities. This arguably was the county’s biggest challenge.

What MCP Is Doing

After conducting a thorough assessment of the legacy systems, MCP subject-matter experts (SMEs) led the county stakeholders through the difficult process of crafting a replacement strategy. Based on this roadmap, MCP then wrote technical specifications and developed request-for-proposals (RFP) documents for each system. A decision was made not to pursue a documents-management system, according to Bob Kaelin, MCP’s vice president of public safety and the project manager. “Modern systems like the ones that are being implemented for McLean County provide this functionality, so a separate documents-management system would be redundant,” he says.

To maintain the legacy integration, a middleware platform is being procured. It will act as the integration hub that connects the law-enforcement records-management, case-management — which serves judges, clerks, prosecutors, and public defenders — and jail-management systems. This solution ensures seamless data flows to mitigate the interoperability challenges encountered with systems from multiple disparate vendors. The middleware features low-code capabilities, enabling rapid development of connections between the systems and customization of data mappings to align with the county's unique workflows. MCP is assisting the development of these interfaces to minimize disruption during the transition.

MCP’s SMEs helped county officials evaluate and score the vendor proposals and supported contract negotiations to ensure that the procured systems and middleware platform align with the technical specifications. They also provided technical and project management support to ensure the successful rollout of the new systems. This involved coordinating with vendors to align project timelines so that they reflected the county's resource limitations, resolving technical challenges, ensuring accountability for deliverables, and working with stakeholders to facilitate smooth adoption, which included advising on training sessions and technical onboarding.

Other critical tasks include the following:

• Creating a centralized data warehouse to enhance information accessibility while maintaining security. The solution involves Indexing key data elements — e.g., names, dates, identifiers, and events — enabling rapid searches across multiple systems; implementing role-based access controls to ensure compliance with security protocols; and building in automatic updates to keep the warehouse synchronized with real-time data changes in the integrated systems.
• Conducting a detailed analysis of the county’s existing integrated justice processes, which involved identifying more than 80 integration points essential for maintaining operational efficiency.
• Establishing a governance framework to define data ownership and accountability, protocols for data sharing and access across systems, and workflow-automation rules to streamline processes such as case initiation, notifications, and interagency communication. This effort is intended to ensure continuity and clarity in how stakeholder organizations interact within the decentralized system.

The Results

All three systems, as well as the middleware platform, have been procured and are being implemented. Already, eight law-enforcement organizations are connected to the new records-management test system and are preparing for implementation. To future-proof McLean County’s infrastructure, each system was designed to be cloud-native, to ensure scalability for future expansion, to reduce infrastructure-management costs, and to optimize resiliency, redundancy, and cybersecurity. Work has begun on the data warehouse and the governance framework, while the integration points have been identified.

Looking to the future, MCP has recommended creation of an enterprise-wide reporting framework. The framework will enable advanced analytics to identify justice trends; extraction of justice data for integration with public-health and other datasets, and automation report generation to reduce the manual workload for county personnel.

The Benefits

Numerous benefits are expected from this project when all infrastructure is implemented. Some of the most important include:

• The new records-management system (RMS), the four new case-management systems (CMS) — court, prosecution, defense, and probation — and new jail-management (JMS) system deliver more-efficient operations, improve data accuracy and accessibility, and enable better-informed decision-making.
• The middleware platform ensures seamless data exchange between the RMS, CMSs, and JMS, maintaining interconnected workflows across agencies.
• The centralized warehouse maintains an overarching view of the justice data that exists in the county, enabling enterprise-wide searches and cross-agency collaboration.

• Automated workflows and streamlined data-entry and search processes reduce manual effort:
• Law-enforcement personnel can file reports directly from the field, saving time.
• Notifications and alerts, such as jail bookings and case filings, are routed to relevant entities automatically, reducing delays in decision-making.
• Organizations no longer need to replicate data entry downstream in the justice process. For example, once law-enforcement personnel enter a report, courts, prosecutors, and jails receive the information automatically.
• Role-based access controls ensure that users only can access data relevant to their role, mitigating the risk of unauthorized access.
• The architecture adheres to modern cybersecurity standards, providing resilience against evolving threats, which positions the county for compliance with state and federal data-security requirements.
• Enterprise-level search tools allow agencies to locate information across systems quickly and efficiently.
• Monthly reporting processes, previously requiring effort from two database administrators, are now automated and can be completed in days.
• Unified access to data across systems ensures that courts, prosecutors, and law-enforcement officials have the full picture when making critical decisions.
• Integration with external datasets, such as public health information, supports innovative solutions for addressing systemic issues.