Thirteen agencies in Franklin County, Tenn., are implementing a new shared software system in an effort to provide field officers with critical information.

The ability to share information among multiple jurisdictions is especially important in a rural area like Franklin County, Greenfield Police Department Captain John Newton said. Officers are often assigned to cover miles of territory, without a partner or other officers nearby. Giving an officer the tools to see if a suspect has a history of violence or is known to carry concealed weapons can mean the difference between life and death, Newton said.

“The more information that we can have available to officers in the field, the safer they are going to be,” he said. “Backup for them could be 20 minutes away, easily.”

Newton said the agencies selected Spillman after a lengthy Request for Proposal (RFP) process in which they searched for an affordable software solution that enabled data to be stored on a central database.

“The Spillman [RFP] ended up being able to do virtually everything that we asked of it,” he said.

The Greenfield Police Department, Greenfield Fire Department, Bernardston Police Department, Buckland Police Department, Colrain Police Department, Deerfield Police Department, Erving Police Department, Gill Police Department, Montague Police Department, Northfield Police Department, Orange Police Department, Shelburne Police Department, and Sunderland Police Department will share data on a server hosted at the Greenfield Police Department.  The agencies utilized grant funds awarded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security through the Western Regional Homeland Security Advisory Council and the U.S. Department of Justice to purchase their software. When the agencies go live with their Spillman system, they will be among more than 900 agencies across the country using Spillman software.

Spillman Technologies is a public safety software provider headquartered in Salt Lake City, serving more than 900 police departments, sheriff’s offices, communications centers, fire departments, and correctional facilities nationwide. Spillman specializes in integrated software solutions, including CAD, RMS, Mobile Data & Field Reporting, Mapping & GIS, Crime Analysis & CompStat, JMS, Fire, Data Sharing, and Personnel & Resources. For more information about Spillman, visit www.spillman.com.