Content area
Full text
For nearly four decades, US and international law enforcement and public safety practitioners have relied on the National Law Enforcement Telecommunication System (NLETS) to obtain and share the critical operational information needed to perform their essential daily tasks.
Many of the nearly one million NLETS users (there are more than 500,000 devices connected to NLETS across the US and Canada) in every law enforcement and criminal justice agency in North America remain largely unaware of their reliance upon this little-known but essential network managed by a non-profit organization of the same name.
Just as we all depend on the availability and performance of public utilities like the national electric power grids and water supply systems, NLETS has worked silently and reliably in the background, constantly serving those who serve and protect.
Motivated by today's pressing requirements, NLETS is stepping out of the background. It is taking on a leading role in the nation's chief public safety challenge-delivering secure, reliable, standards-based information-sharing services for the justice and public safety community.
NLETS today offers a federated information-sharing model long established in the demanding law enforcement environment-where communication breakdowns cannot be tolerated. NLETS also has become critical at a time when the nation must enhance its ability to collaborate across federal and state and local government, and across public safety's many disciplinary boundaries-such as law enforcement, prosecutors, courts, corrections and probation, emergency medical response, fire fighters, and public health.
NLETS understands the importance of reliable communications services and was an early adopter of accepted technology standards - extensible markup language (XML), Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) - in order to maximize the information-sharing potential of its members. Based on Microsoft Corporation's industry-standard .NET framework as well as the secure reliability of the company's Windows Server 2003, law enforcement and the public safety community have quickly benefited from the information-sharing capabilities of the new technology.
NLETS in Justice and Public Safety
Created in 1966 by the principal law enforcement agencies of all 50 states, NLETS' role has evolved from being primarily an interstate telecommunications service for law enforcement to a broad-based network providing an ever-growing number of key services to the justice and public safety communities at local, state, federal and international government levels.
The NLETS mission...