This week, I will be attending the National RTCC conference, the second conference for this newer law enforcement association. Over the last year, I’ve had an opportunity to sit down and meet with many analysts and investigators assigned to RTCCs throughout the US. Every time I meet with someone at a RTCC, I’m reminded of my time at the Washington/Baltimore HIDTA the information sharing challenges I faced when it came to creating and sharing bulletins.
While running the Evaluation and Crime Mapping Unit at the Washington/Baltimore HIDTA in the early 2000's, I still remember the day that an excited colleague from the US Attorney's Office walked into my office - he had an idea. Here's how that conversation went:
Frank: Joe, what if we mapped all of the gang areas in Washington DC and made them into one of your GIS layers so that we can compare crime that's happening inside those areas to other areas? We could learn so much more about the gang problem.
Me: Sounds great. I'd love to help with that.
Frank: Ok, when can you have the map done?
Me: When can you get me the data?
Frank: Data, what do you mean?
Me: Well, I have no idea where these gang areas are or anything about these gangs so I need some data to make a map.
Frank: How do I get that?
Me: Well, what if I print you out a map of the entire city of Washington DC with the streets labeled and the PSA's (Police Service Areas) outlined. Then you take that map out to the Districts, meet with the gang unit, patrol officers, and investigators, and gather intel. You can use the map for notetaking. Draw a polygon on the map and then draw a line to the border where you write in whatever details that you want to capture (colors, propensity of violence, weapon of choice, leader name, etc.).
Frank: (Rolls up map and starts to walk out) I'll do it! I will get you some great data!
My colleague, Kevin Armstrong, and I look at each other and said, "well, we probably won't see that map again."
A few months passed and Frank was back in the office with this torn up,coffee-stained map that had polygons drawn all over it with tons of text and details. He did it! He got into the head of the gang unit, the detectives, and the patrol officers and captured all this valuable information. Thankfully, Kevin was a gifted cartographer and turned it into the map. Not only did this map make it into the ESRI Map Book, but I understand that the GIS layer was updated and used for over a decade at the HIDTA to understand crime problems in DC and how they potentially related to drugs and gangs.
People + Technology = Success
Recently our BLTN solution found an interesting pattern. An automated link was found between five bulletins with a similar Modus Operandi. In these cases, the suspects were trying to pass bad checks at banks using fake ID's in different cities, but all in the same region. The coolest part is that at least one of those bulletins passed through a Fusion Center prior to its addition into BLTN. The Fusion Center added information into BLTN that linked the bulletin to three other incidents in three different cities in that same region. In this series of cases, human analysts used various resources to find four seemingly related incidents. Then, BLTN tied one of those incidents to four other cases.
The moral of the story is that without BLTN, these agencies would not have seen the full view of these offenses. Without adding the bulletins, and some intelligence into the BLTN system, they may have never been connected to each other.
For Real-Time Crime Centers, data and intelligence pour in from everywhere – video feeds, 911 calls, License Plate Readers – the list goes on. A solution like BLTN can tackle information sharing from area bulletins by taking the manual work and automating it – tying images from bulletins in BLTN to other images uploaded to the system, finding similarities in MO, and finding patterns. The benefit to RTCCs is exponential – manual work will be automated, analysts will be able to refocus on analysis and cases will be connected that may have gone unsolved. RTCC will become more efficient in how they handle critical incidents and more cases will be tied together and solved thanks to information sharing platforms like BLTN.
Human analysts working with technology to help find patterns, investigate cases, and keep communities safer. People +Technology = Success
