To: Board of Supervisors
From: David O. Livingston, Sheriff-Coroner
Report Title: West Advanced Technologies - ARIES Maintenance and Support
☒Recommendation of the County Administrator ☐ Recommendation of Board Committee
RECOMMENDATIONS:
APPROVE and AUTHORIZE the Sheriff-Coroner, or designee, to execute a contract with West Advanced Technologies, Inc. in an amount not to exceed $450,000 to provide maintenance and support for the Automated Regional Information Exchange System (ARIES) software application and database for the period January 1, 2026 through December 31, 2028.
FISCAL IMPACT:
Approval of this request will result in up to $450,000 in contractual expenditures over a 2-year period and will be funded 100% by the General Fund.
BACKGROUND:
The Automated Regional Information Exchange System (ARIES) is a proprietary software application owned and operated by the Office of the Sheriff, Contra Costa County (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 several modules within the application. These include:
• Live Search and Beagle: These two modules allow officers to access person’s information, including criminal history, probation status, protective/restraining orders, property data, and firearms.
• Total Booking: This module streamlines the booking process through a secure, automated electronic interface connecting officers, the County’s jail management system, and, when appropriate, the court for probable cause declaration review and action. The interface helps ensure critical timelines are met, supporting accurate offense charging and the timely processing, citation issuance, and release of individuals.
• Crime Lab: This module provides law enforcement agencies and the District Attorney’s Office timely access to downloadable crime lab reports for use in investigations and cases, including DNA, toxicology analysis, alcohol analysis, forensic biology discovery, ballistic imaging, and more.
• Subpoena: This module integrates with the District Attorney’s Office to provide regular updates to law enforcement agencies on their officers’ status for court appearances.
• Alerts: This module allows officers to enter requests to be alerted for cases such as missing persons or other cases involving a threat to the public or officer safety.
• 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.
ARIES enables subscribing agencies to access arrest and crime data shared across participating law enforcement agencies. This information is processed and stored on the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office (CCCSO) on-premise servers. Over time, ARIES has achieved several technological milestones, resulting in the modern platform currently used by more than 10,000 users across over 104 agencies.
Significant modernization of ARIES has occurred over the past five years through a partnership with West Advanced Technologies, Inc. (WATI). WATI was first awarded an ARIES contract in 2017 to begin modernization efforts, which included enhancing, developing, and supporting the underlying technology. In 2022, following a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) process, WATI was again selected to lead the migration of ARIES from aging on-premise servers to the California State Sheriffs’ Association (CSSA) Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure.
The purpose of the ARIES Maintenance and Support contract is for WATI to continue providing technical maintenance and support for ARIES, including software and programming, multiple user interface layers, integration with over one hundred data sources and databases, and its infrastructure.
CONSEQUENCE OF NEGATIVE ACTION:
If the Board does not approve, The ARIES program will be unable to adequately support the exponential growth of data within the system, the ongoing and future technological improvements, and the increasing demand for reliability, functionality, and system availability, which more than 10,000 users depend on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.