Book 'em, Dano right at your PC Maryland weaves a dragnet of data with a booking system that identifies suspects fast By John Breeden II GCN Staff With the records of 45,000 lawbreakers processed at the Baltimore City Central Booking and Intake Center in its first year of operation, officers at Maryland's busiest suspect processing facility are fighting crime by tapping into better information faster. At large no more Waudby said suspects arrested in Maryland but wanted on warrants around the country are no longer returned to the streets. The records were previously mailed between police stations, so suspects often were released weeks before the state learned they were wanted on other charges. A more rural county with only five or six arrests each day does not need to have some of the more advanced components that are used to track offenders in Baltimore, where there can be hundreds of arrests in a day.
Officers use the case processing database when they bring a suspect into custody.
The database includes a dictionary of standard charges as well as appropriate language for preparing the arrest forms. The PCs have 24M RAM and either 340M or 540M hard drives. As its primary database servers, the system has a pair of IBM 720s with an IBM 3815 external redundant array of inexpensive disks controller. Calif. The database files reside on the 3815 RAID controller. The system lets officers cut and paste approved language into their charging documents, so the chance of an offender being set free on a technicality is nearly zero, state officials said.