News Story

CapWIN Evaluates eBOLO Application

The Capital Wireless Information Net (CapWIN) located within the A. James Clark School of Enginering's Deartment of Civil and Environmental Engineering is working with several law enforcement agencies in the metropolitan region to evaluate the recently completed electronic be on the lookout (eBOLO) software application. eBOLO was developed by CapWIN under a grant from the National Capital Region (NCR) Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX). It was created to provide a digital form of messaging among various law enforcement dispatch centers in the NCR. Its purpose is to provide a means of sending eBOLO messages between one or more communication centers. The functionality of the application is modeled after the existing analog Police Mutual Aid Radio System (PMARS). eBOLO is intended to augment PMARS by adding a number of capabilities not available in the PMARS system, e.g., adding attachments such as maps, drawings, photographs, etc.; sending messages to individual centers rather than broadcasting to all centers; and notifying the sender that the message has been received by each agency. The electronic eBOLO system is also inherently more secure than unencrypted analog radio. Finally, the application is extremely flexible and can be adapted for many purposes, such as secure intra-departmental communications among divisions, units, or task forces.

For further information about eBOLO please contact Roddy Moscoso, CapWIN, 301-614-3728, rmoscoso@capwin.org.

About CapWIN

The Capital Wireless Information Net (CapWIN) is a program located in the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technology (CATT) that was created by, and continues to operate under the direction of a coalition of law enforcement, fire/EMS, and transportation agencies in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia to advance data communications across agency, jurisdiction, government, and discipline boundaries. For more information about CapWIN visit www.capwin.org.