(April 21) Every year, approximately nine million people travel through San Bernardino County to go to Las Vegas.
This has appealed to the entrepreneurial spirit of many corporations  and enterprising individuals, who have seized the opportunity to set up businesses, ranging from gas stations and mini-marts, to liquor stores, fast food drive-thrus and restaurants, along the I-15 Freeway corridor to capture the money of their fellow Californians sojourning to and from the gambling mecca.
Law enforcement officers have also taken advantage of  the opportunity this provides them to make some arrests.
Facilitating this is the COPLINK® system and a just-entered-into  memorandum of understanding between the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department.
According to San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department Captain Shannon Dicus, the foundation for enhanced, digitally assisted communication between the sheriff’s department and other agencies was established  in 2009 when a Homeland Security Grant award provided $1,078,910 for the acquisition of the COPLINK ® system and its installation in eleven law enforcement agencies, and fourteen sheriff’s contract cities/towns, the sheriff’s unincorporated area including the county jails, and the county probation department.
The COPLINK ® system data repository node containing information from law enforcement member agencies in San Bernardino County has become the centerpiece of what is referred to as the San Bernardino County Data Sharing Initiative, and the sheriff’s department serves as its administering agency.
Across the California border, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department is the administering agency of the COPLINK® data repository node of law enforcement information in its geographic area for the State of Nevada.
In a report to the board of supervisors dated April 21, Dicus referenced the roughly nine million travelers through San Bernardino County on their way to Las Vegas, going on to say, “Many of these individuals are contacted for different reasons by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement agencies in the southwest portion of the state of Nevada. The information gathered from those contacts is entered into their COPLINK® node and is often requested and found valuable by local law enforcement agencies to solve crimes within San Bernardino County.”
At Dicus’ recommendation, the county board of supervisors on Tuesday entered into a non-financial memorandum of understanding between the county of San Bernardino Sheriff-Coroner’s Department and the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department for the sharing of law enforcement information through the San Bernardino County Data Sharing Initiative.
“The purpose of this MOU is to facilitate and improve the sharing of law enforcement information owned by member agencies, other than San Bernardino County Data Sharing Initiative, and the  Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, for which they have been allowed custodial status by agreements with these agencies,” said Dicus.