The CapWIN network will let law enforcement agencies and others do three things: communicate with one another over a secure instant messaging network; search multiple databases; and permit better coordination between different agencies or officers responding to an emergency. A police officer arriving at an emergency, for example, could enter a chat area to get a current summary of the situation while others at distant locations could run licence plate checks with different state and federal agencies on vehicles leaving the scene. The network will run on standard PCs, handhelds and cell phones. On the back end, it will run on clustered IBM eServers that will link to installed servers and databases. The first stage in the project, which will be complete in a year, will revolve around creating and testing the basic network, said Blossom. Later, functions like voice may be added, said Ake. While the World Trade Center attacks intensified the need for cross-agency and cross-jurisdiction communication, the project actually goes back to 1999. That year, a man threatened to jump off the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which connects Virginia and Maryland. The standoff lasted seven hours. "He stopped traffic on the whole East Coast," Ake said. The police officers at opposite ends of the bridge couldn't speak directly to each other during the crisis because they came from different agencies and ran independent networks. Ake created a similar network connecting law enforcement agencies within the state of North Carolina and came out of retirement to run CapWIN, he said. "This is a lot more complicated because you have three jurisdictions (Washington, Virginia and Maryland) and the federal government," he said. Participating agencies include the Maryland Highway Administration, the US Department of Justice's Office of Domestic Preparedness, and police and fire units in Alexandria, Va.; Arlington, Va.; and other regional cities.
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