Public safety challenges rarely stop at jurisdictional boundaries. As one of our agency leaders puts it, “crime doesn’t stop at city lines,” and neither should a city’s data. It is extremely common to see a vehicle connected to a burglary in one city and appear in a traffic violation in another. A domestic violence suspect with repeated calls for service may move to a neighboring county. Gang activity, narcotics distribution, organized retail theft, and repeat offenders often operate regionally, while the data agencies rely on remains fragmented locally.
The Problem
For years, regional data sharing initiatives have tried to address this problem, but most approaches fall into one of two traps: they either become nationwide “people indexes” with limited context, or they turn into massive shared repositories that still require analysts to manually assemble meaning from disconnected records. Neither model truly supports operational decision making. ForceMetrics Velocity™ was built to tackle these issues and properly support data collaboration between cities, states, and counties.
How Velocity Supports
Instead of simply sharing names or pushing more records into a shared “lake,” Velocity is designed for regional operations. The platform unifies records across jurisdictions, including people, locations, vehicles, incidents, calls for service, and other related activity. Doing so while also preserving the agency context that provided the information in the first place is an important distinction. An officer, investigator, or analyst needs to know more than simply where a name exists in a neighboring system. They need to be able to understand the why, the story behind that individual, their complete legal history that helps support immediate action.
When using Velocity, agencies receive actionable insights instead of fragmented search results. Imagine a patrol officer was conducting a vehicle stop near a jurisdictional boundary. Within seconds, the officer can see that the vehicle was recently associated with multiple incidents in neighboring agencies, linked to recurring addresses, and connected to individuals involved in recent calls for service elsewhere in the region. The officer is not searching five different systems or waiting for an analyst to build a report hours, or even days, later. The regional context is already connected and operationalized in real time.
Lasting Impacts Across Regions
Every connected agency strengthens the value of the Velocity platform for every other partner. As more jurisdictions participate, the system becomes more effective at surfacing patterns, identifying cross-boundary activity, and accelerating collaboration between frontline personnel, investigators, analysts, dispatch, and command staff. Many regional sharing systems struggle due to the operational burden still having to fall on users to interpret the disconnected records manually…this eats up a lot of time, and is subject to human error in an area it doesn’t need to. Velocity Focuses on making shared information immediately usable through investigative workflows, alerts, contextual search, and additional tools that support your decisions and naturally fit into daily operations.
For public safety, data sharing is table stakes, and in this rapidly-evolving technological world, it should be made easier, and more effective than it currently is–and while others only share names or disconnected data, Velocity shares context and empowers more confident decisions.
