The Virginia Beach Police Department found itself down 100 officers and 25 professional staff. Rather than wait for those roles to fill, the department has turned to software to get more out of existing resources, records, and people alike.

The tool is Peregrine Technologies, a platform that unifies the data an agency holds, connects and contextualizes information, and makes it searchable in one place. For a department stretched thin, the appeal is the prospect of fewer hours spent hunting through disconnected systems, and more hours devoted to the work only people can do.

One search box for 19 million records

Most police departments hold far more information than any officer can readily reach. It sits in separate systems that were never built to talk to each other, so a question that should take seconds to answer can take an entire afternoon.

“Oftentimes we have sources of information across the police department that traditionally do not talk to each other,” said Brandon Kyle, the department’s police technology administrator. “The purpose of Peregrine is to break down some of those data silos and make connections for our detectives, investigators, analysts, and allow them to search it almost like you would search Google.”

Kyle said the platform pulls together 19 million records drawn from the department’s own systems, from computer-aided dispatch to body-worn camera footage. The result is recovered time and information that would otherwise stay buried. “A lot of time has been saved, a lot of return on investment, finding information that would never have been surfaced before,” he said. “We continue to see those successes just in the short time that we have been using it.”

Most of the value comes from making routine investigative work faster. An investigator who once pulled records from several systems by hand, one login at a time, can run a single query instead. Multiply that across a caseload, and the hours add up in a way a short-staffed department notices.

Efficiency as a staffing strategy

With 100 fewer officers than it is budgeted for, the department was unable to add people to keep pace with its workload, so it had to make the workload lighter to carry.

“It really amplifies our need to become more efficient with the way that we’re processing our information, and that’s what Peregrine allows us to do,” Kyle said.

That framing fits the argument Peregrine Technologies makes to the governments it serves. The company is adamant that it does not gather, create, or sell data. It takes the records an agency already has and brings them into one environment where authorized users can find what they need faster than they could by searching each system on its own. It then connects and contextualizes otherwise disparate data points to give users–from leadership to the frontline–an accurate, real-time, and shared understanding of reality.

What the platform does not do

Kyle was specific about the guardrails built into Peregrine’s platform. Peregrine enforces the permissions each organization already has in place, meaning users can access only the information they are already authorized to see. The system does not reach into social media or buy data from brokers, so its scope is confined to records the department generated in the course of its own work.

The platform’s AI is powerful, but deliberately constrained, designed to complement human judgment, not replace it. It helps employees analyze information, connect relevant context, and generate useful outputs, yet it can only use information each employee is already authorized to access, every response links back to the underlying records, and people remain responsible for deciding how to act. The department also runs incoming data through its own quality controls.

“Every piece of information has gone through a quality assurance, quality control method to make sure that the information that’s coming through Peregrine is how we would expect to see it from our source systems,” Kyle said.

Peregrine Technologies described the same guardrails in a statement to WAVY, a local news outlet. “Peregrine helps agencies protect the privacy and civil liberties of the people they serve by making responsible data access more secure, controlled, and enforceable,” a company spokesperson said. “The platform reinforces each agency’s own policies through permissions, purpose-based access controls, and audit logging that help ensure transparency and accountability.”

A growing footprint in Hampton Roads and beyond

Virginia Beach is not the only local force using the platform. The Norfolk Police Department uses Peregrine as well, which gives neighboring agencies in Hampton Roads a shared way of working with their own records.

Peregrine Technologies, founded in 2018 and based in San Francisco, has grown quickly on the strength of that model. The company now serves more than 400 organizations covering roughly 125 million people, and in June it raised $250 million in a funding round that valued Peregrine at $6.8 billion.

The Virginia Beach deployment is one example of what that model offers a public agency. It is not a new source of information, but it’s a faster way to find it.

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