To: Board of Supervisors
From: David O. Livingston, Sheriff-Coroner
Report Title: Insight Public Sector (IPS) on behalf of the California State Sheriffs’ Association (CSSA)
☒Recommendation of the County Administrator ☐ Recommendation of Board Committee
RECOMMENDATIONS:
APPROVE and AUTHORIZE the Sheriff-Coroner, or designee, to execute a contract with California State Sheriffs’ Association (CSSA) to deploy the Office of the Sheriff’s Automated Regional Information Exchange System (ARIES) criminal justice information database and other Office of the Sheriff software databases in the CSSA cloud, in an amount not to exceed $1,200,000, for the period of March 1, 2024 through December 31, 2028
FISCAL IMPACT:
Approval of this request will result in up to $1,200,000 in contractual service expenditures and will be funded 100% by ARIES Orgs #2551 and #2562.
BACKGROUND:
The Automated Regional Information Exchange System (ARIES) is a proprietary software application owned and operated by the Contra Costa County Office of the Sheriff (CCCSO). ARIES is used by the CCCSO and partnered law enforcement agencies for a wide variety of essential law enforcement functions which are accessed from sub-modules within the application.
These include:
• Live Search: This module allows officers to access persons information, including criminal history, whether persons are the subject of protective or restraining orders (either the protected or prohibited person), information on property (i.e., if said property has been reported as stolen) and information on firearms.
• Total Booking: This module streamlines the booking process, allowing for more efficient booking of a person, ensuring that timelines which affect areas such as offense charging and timely processing for issuance of citation and release of persons are met.
• ALPR (Automated License Plate Reader): This module allows for immediate checks on license plates associated with critical cases, i.e., child abductions or other cases regarding imminent threat to the public.
• Alerts: This module allows officers to enter and check for alerts in cases such as missing persons or other cases involving a threat to public or officer safety.
• Location Alerts: This module allows officers to flag a particular address for future reference, i.e., immediately advising the officer if the victim in an on-going domestic violence event reports that the suspect has returned to the flagged location.
• Person Alerts: This module functions on the same principle as the Location Alert, but tracks a person instead of a location, i.e., the suspect in the above-described domestic violence investigation is contacted.
• Documents: This module is a one-stop repository of important documents, such as the Domestic Violence Report Supplemental, Child Abuse Reporting Form, Suspected Dependent Adult/Elder Abuse Reporting Form, Strangulation Assessment Card and Domestic Violence Proof of Service (and Instructions) and Domestic Violence Resource Pamphlet.
The system also allows partners to manage arrest and crime data collected from law enforcement agencies, all of which are processed and stored in CCCSO on-premises servers. Over the years, ARIES has reached several technological milestones that have led to the modern interface that over 10,000 users from 105+ different agencies use today.
Much of ARIES’s modernization has been accomplished in the last seven years thanks to a partnership with West Advanced Technologies, Inc. (WATI). WATI was awarded their first ARIES contract in 2017 to begin the modernization process which involved improving, developing, and supporting the technology behind ARIES. In early 2022, WATI was selected from a competitive request for proposal bidding process to accomplish the next logical milestone for ARIES: to migrate its aging on-premises servers to the California State Sheriffs Association (CSSA) Azure Cloud (“CSSA Cloud”).
The ARIES program received approval to migrate its on-premises hardware and network infrastructure historically located at the CCCSO to the CSSA Cloud as stated in County Contract No. 49752-01. While this contract is between CCCSO and WATI, the CSSA Cloud was named as its intended destination.
The CSSA Cloud program is owned by the California State Sheriffs’ Association on the Microsoft Azure GovCloud platform. It was developed by the CSSA for all Sheriff’s Offices across the state of California meeting stringent Department of Justice (DOJ) Criminal Justice Information System (CJIS) government cloud requirements. In May 2022, the CSSA first launched the CSSA Cloud program offering to all California Sheriff’s agencies. Then, a year after the CSSA Cloud launch, the CSSA partnered with Insight Public Sector (IPS) to provide financial/billing services on behalf of the CSSA.
The CCCSO joined the CSSA Cloud program at its launch in May 2022, although it was not used until January 2023 when the CCCSO migrated the ARIES program to the CSSA Cloud. Since then, the CCCSO started to incur CSSA Cloud usage and consumption fees. Insight Public Sector is the CSSA’s designated partner to provide financial/billing services for costs incurred from CSSA Cloud program consumption and usage fees. This contract would ensure the continuity of the CSSA Cloud program as well as allow the CCCSO to continue hosting ARIES and other applications in the CSSA Cloud.
Due to the original CSSA Cloud Agreement being signed by an unauthorized signer without prior review or approval by County Counsel or the Board of Supervisors, the Board of Supervisors previously approved for the Office of the Sheriff to pay IPS for services provided in good faith between the period of January 2023 and February 2024 while the contract was being reviewed. IPS continues to provide services in good faith while the contract is being finalized.
The agreement includes County indemnity and a limitation of liability, and payments for this contract are to be made payable to CSSA’s third party biller, Insight Public Sector.
CONSEQUENCE OF NEGATIVE ACTION:
If the Board does not approve, Insight Public Sector will not be paid for services that they continue to render in good faith and we risk the County’s reputation and relationship with the CSSA, IPS and Microsoft. Additionally, the entire CSSA Cloud, a multi-year, multi-agency partnership program developed specifically for all California Sheriffs and several law enforcement agencies, will be in danger of shutting down. Other than ARIES, other critical applications already hosted in the CSSA Cloud will be adversely affected, such as the RIPA (Racial and Identity Profiling Act) application, another cloud-based application already in use by the Sheriff’s Office and multiple law enforcement agencies to meet DOJ CJIS requirements.