IBM today announced that it is working with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) to help improve the city's public safety and secure information sharing with the agency's regional partners.

Used by more than 3,000 law enforcement agencies across the U.S., IBM's i2 crime analytics software will enable LVMPD officers to accelerate their investigations by enabling them to make non-obvious connections based on information that was previously spread across the department.

Las Vegas joins cities like New York, Memphis, Los Angeles, Tucson, and many others by establishing Smarter Cities where safety and services for citizens are improved through new technologies while preserving government budget resources. Despite budget constraints, technology has played a significant role in that.

According to the FBI's Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report released last month, crime rates within the first six months of 2011 were down compared to the same period of 2010. Violent crimes fell by 6.4 percent, arson offenses were down by 8.6 percent and motor vehicle theft fell five percent.

The largest police department in Nevada, the LVMPD serves about 1.4 million citizens within Clark County and employs more than 2,200 sworn police officers and more than 650 sworn corrections officers, as well as more than 1,500 civilian employees. LVMPD partners and shares information with an extended information network of law enforcement agencies, including military and federal contacts.

The addition of IBM's crime-fighting software will enable LVMPD to quickly organize and rapidly analyze vast quantities of seemingly unrelated data currently housed in four disparate databases. Departments that use the solution, COPLINK, can form information-sharing agreements across the state and with other states and jurisdictions that also use COPLINK.

"Leading police organizations such as LVMPD are looking for intelligent tools to help find hidden clues in mountains of data they already have," said Robert Griffin, head of i2 at IBM. "Time and again, we've seen customers generate results in the first 30 days of use. It's not just about connecting the dots but the right dots in minutes and hours versus days or weeks or longer. Such capabilities support LVMPD's primary mission of providing public safety for the citizens of Las Vegas and surrounding areas."

One component of the deployment is COPLINK Analysis Search that provides crime analysts with the ability to access and analyze data housed in COPLINK from Analyst's Notebook. Since LVMPD has used i2's Analyst's Notebook and iBase for more than 10 years, the addition of COPLINK further enriches the capacity to not only generate leads in solving crimes, but also use existing data in making non-obvious connections between people, places and other entities, including mobile devices, phone records and vehicles.

The combination of these tools enables public safety agencies such as LVMPD to make smarter, more efficient decisions in the way they solve cases, share information, and ultimately increase the safety and security of cities. Deploying COPLINK will make it easier for the police officers on the street to collaborate more effectively on cases with the criminal analysts who increasingly play a larger role in investigations.

COPLINK can complement IBM's Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities, which will allow cities to use information and analytics to make smarter and more timely decisions, helping local leaders manage a spectrum of events, both planned and unplanned, such as deploying water maintenance crews to repair pumps before they break, alerting fire crews to broken fire hydrants at an emergency scene, or anticipating traffic congestion and preparing redirection scenarios.

For more information about IBM Smarter Cities, visit www.ibm.com/smartercities.

For more information about i2, an IBM Company, visit www.i2group.com.