Modesto Police Department: Integrating mobile technology to keep patrol officers safe

• The Modesto PD needed a mobile-friendly data integration solution to improve patrol officers’ ability to manage and action data.
• Peregrine gives Modesto’s patrol officers real-time access to critical data for better situational awareness and enhanced officer safety.
• Data integration provides support for short-staffed public safety agencies by streamlining officers’ workflows.

MODESTO, Calif. — The Modesto Police Department’s patrol officers use a diverse suite of tech tools in their mobile offices (that is, their squad cars). Many of those tools — including body-worn cameras, dashboard cameras, mobile automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras, and mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, and smartphones — collect and contain large amounts of data. Still, Modesto's patrol officers struggled to fully harness that data on the go without an integration solution.

“We have to give patrol officers as much information as possible to help them make sound decisions, for their own safety and the citizens safety,” Thaddeus Johnson, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Georgia State University, told Police1.

The Modesto PD invested in Peregrine to improve data access for the agency’s patrol personnel. This helps keep officers safe by giving them better situational awareness in situations like traffic stops, according to Modesto PD Detective Joshua Lawrence. Though traffic stops are routine, it’s “the most routine situations that sometimes end up being the most dangerous,” Lawrence said.

Without a data integration tool, a patrol officer may only know a license plate number and passenger count at the beginning of a traffic stop. But a Modesto patrol officer with Peregrine can run a simple mobile search of the vehicle’s license plate number to pull integrated data from the agency’s ALPR systems, records management systems, and other data sources.

Lawrence told Police1 this data can help a patrol officer make decisions, such as, “From which side to I approach the vehicle? Do I need to get a second officer on the scene before I approach it?”

He added that enhanced data access helps fill in gaps where the Modesto PD has been experiencing staffing shortages.

“One officer empowered by a handful of tech tools can handle the tasks of two officers without tech support,” Lawrence told Police1.

To learn more about how the Modesto PD is leveraging data integration on the go to maximize mobile technology tools, read Police1’s full article.