How to prevent home invasion robbery

Three words of advice I gave yesterday during my monthly on-air chat with KFOR Radio's Dale Johnson:

"Don't deal drugs."

I'll have some more on home invasion robbery next week.

In the press

My early morning hobby, The Chief's Corner, isn't the only writing I do. There are a couple of articles in national police publications this month that I submitted over the summer. You'll recognize some similarities between past posts on The Chief's Corner and the content of these articles in the September issues of Law Officer, and The Police Chief.

Underrated crime

I'll admit it. I'm guilty of it too. Bicycle thefts have never been on my list of serious crime. Despite the fact that I've owned one or more pricey steeds continuously since my freshman year in college (yes, the bicycle had been invented), I've never been the victim of a theft. If I had been, I'm sure it would be much higher in my hierarchy of criminality. Being a victim yourself tends to do that. It has moved up a notch however, in the wake of last Wednesday's ACUDAT meeting.

The Crime Analysis Unit made a nice catch recently. Sgt. Grant Richards discovered a group of half a dozen stolen bikes that were pawned by a thief on the same day of the theft. The going sale price for a really nice bike at a pawn shop is $50. Not bad for a Kona Unit 2-9 valued at $943. Doing a little research, Sgt. Richards found three other suspects who have been pawning stolen bikes regularly of late.

This was good work by the Crime Analysis Unit, but it shows we've got to redouble our efforts to prevent thieves from using pawn shops to offload stolen high-end bicycles. It's easy for pawn brokers to check our stolen property records to determine if a bike has been reported stolen (although the stolen report is about a day behind the crime), and it's also easy for the investigating officer to check our electronic pawn records to determine if the stolen bike has turned up in a pawn shop after a couple weeks have passed. There are several other ways to dispose of a stolen bicycle, and I seriously doubt that pawnshops are anywhere close to being the most common method. Nonetheless, that's a fairly easy door to close more firmly by diligent checks.

Here's why it's important. Bicycle theft is an underrated crime. So far this year, there have been 494 bike thefts in Lincoln. The loss has been $100,305. That's not even counting the 71 burglaries in which bicycles were among the stolen goods. Last year, the total dollar loss from bicycle theft was $125,301. Robberies, by comparison resulted in a total loss of $92,839.

Easy button

Capt. Joe Wright used the phrase yesterday to describe this phenomenon. It's one I have blogged about on a few prior occasions. This example is from Tuesday. Our Information Technology manager, Mr. Clair Lindquist, brought it to my attention Thursday morning. The summary comments field, "LAID ON FLOOR, WOULD NOT PARTICIPATE IN THERAPY SESSION," must have caused him to do a double take and read the full report. The key players are a 7 year old girl, a private counselor, a private medical transportation provider, and a caseworker in the Children & Families division of the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services. They pressed the easy button, but it didn't function quite the way they were hoping (click on the report to enlarge the image .)

In order to protect identities, I had to edit this report a little more aggressively than normal. There are 422 Lincoln police employees, though (many of whom read this blog) who can attest that this edited version is faithful to the original.

In summary, the solution to a 7 year old who won't participate in her therapy session, when the transport company doesn't want to come back: call the cops. That's the best a couple professionals could come up with.

This is not about workload: it's about ethics, the appropriate use of police authority, and the compassionate care of patients and clients with dignity. I commend Officer Matt Tangen for diplomatically suggesting an alternative, and declining to participate in an improper use of the coercive powers of the police. In addition, I thank the worker at the foster care company who simply drove over and picked the child up. A familiar caregiver sounds a lot better to me than the plastic back seat of a patrol car.

Before I wrote this post, I described this case and discussed the general issue with a group of University of Nebraska students in Dr. Susan Jacob's Criminal Justice Ethics class, CJ 406, where I was a guest Thursday afternoon. They felt that this is an issue the general public needs to be more informed about, and suggested that I redact any identifying information from specific cases. This is not the first time I've asked for ethical advice from university students in the past, and it's proven to be valuable..

Moving day burglaries?

Yesterday morning, I met with our Crime Analysis Unit, in preparation for our ADUDAT meeting later in the day. We were reviewing recent burglary trends, and discussing the recent uptick in burglaries at apartment complexes. In a few of these burglaries, thieves loaded up the small electronics (iPods, digital cameras, laptops and the like) in laundry baskets. A number of televisions were taken. I have often wondered aloud how someone makes of with a box full of stuff without anyone in the complex noticing. Better yet, how to you spirit away a 50" plasma TV in broad daylight?

Crime Analyst Char Estes had an answer. She noted that many of our recent burglaries happened on September 30 and October 1. She theorized that the large number of tenants moving in and out around the first of the month provided cover for a couple of blokes wrestling with a TV, and that someone carrying a box or laundry basket through the hallway or parking lot would not attract much attention. Interesting thought.

After our meeting, I did a little analysis of my own. There have been 348 residential burglaries of apartments so far this year. Here's where those have occurred. It gets a little complicated, because some apartments have a single address for the entire complex, some have separate addresses on each building, and there are even some with separate addresses for each apartment. The larger the dot, the more burglaries at an individual street address--from one to five.


The map essentially shows the location of multiple-family dwellings in Lincoln. The cluster just south of the downtown area is the densest concentration of apartments, although the bigger complexes are at the fringe of the city--where more land was available for development. Here's the burglaries of apartments by day of the month for the 3,760 apartment burglaries in Lincoln since January 1, 2000:


Char's observation about first-of-the-month burglaries proves to be correct: there is a significant spike on the first day of the month. I'm not quite sure what this means. What do you think?

IACA conference

The International Association of Crime Analysts sent me on a very short trip to St. Petersburg, to serve as a presenter and Tuesday's keynote speaker at their annual conference. I appear to be the only police chief that is a member of the association, but I do not think of myself as a crime analyst. I'm a police officer who is comfortable with data, evidence, analysis, and information, but this certainly is not the focus of my professional life.

Some of the long-time members of the association refer to me as the "anti-chief." I think this is because they have met me in an environment totally different than that in which they interact with their own chief. I am not alone, and I associate with a group of like-minded chiefs.

My message to the crime analysts was one which is frequently revealed here in The Chief's Corner: focus on prevention; think outside the box; be an advocate for new approaches to crime, but be scrupulously honest in demanding evidence of effectiveness before you become an evangelist for something that sounds smart, but does not produce proven results. Always acknowledge the fact that you might be wrong. I try to practice what I preach, but it's incredibly difficult. That's one of the benefits of a blog that allows anonymous comments: if I've done it or said it, I better be able to either defend it or willing to abandon it.

In Architecture Hall

Last Thursday night, I spent three hours with Dr. Yunwoo Nam's class, "Planning with GIS" at the University of Nebraska's Department of Community and Regional Planning. My role was to introduce the class to the way geographic information systems are used in policing. I did a short PowerPoint presentation, then the class and I did a little analytical work: examining the impact of residency restrictions on sex offenders, checking out recent patterns or residential burglary in the city, and analyzing dispatch data to determine the best location for the Northeast Team to locate a substation.

Judging from the interaction and the questions, I think this was a particularly interesting class session for the students. It is a three hour class that meets once a week, and I filled the entire time. As the class was breaking up, I reminded the stsudent that I see many job announcements for police crime analysts, and GIS experience is often one of the chief qualifications employers are looking for. Two of my former interns have found nice jobs, and crime analysis is a dynamic and growing field as more and more agencies learn it's value.

Dr. Nam's class was in room 316 in Architecture Hall, my favorite campus building, dripping with history and resplendent in it's late 19th Century architecture. When I was an undergraduate, the most spectacular marble urinals I had ever seen were located in the men's room on the ground floor. I tried to check them out, but the door I thought led to the toilet is marked as room 102 and does not appear to be a restroom any longer. That's a pity--it should have been preserved.

On the same subject (crime analysis, that is), Friday I spent the morning reviewing proposals from three companies who are in the running to serve as consultants on the Nebraska Fusion Center. Fusion centers are the rage in law enforcement at the moment, as Federal funding streams have opened to encourage the development of these information sharing and analysis centers. The State Patrol, Crime Commission, Omaha police, and Lincoln police are the major players in the project, coordinated by NSP.

The committee met in the conference room of the Nebraska State Patrol's Criminal Identification Division, at 233 S. 10th Street. When I arrived, one of the employees started to give me directions to the conference room. There was no need: the room was my personal office for over six years. Other than the furniture, it hasn't changed at all.

Police car wrong solution

The tragic story of a single mom coping with a mentally ill 12 year old son appeared in yesterday's Lincoln Journal Star. I have incredible sympathy for what she is going through. I talked to her a few weeks ago, when she called me to express her displeasure that a police officer would not transport her handcuffed child in a patrol car to the hospital. LPD took a bit of criticism in the comments. The very first commenter misinterpreted this passage in the article:

"His mother knew he needed to go to the hospital. But the officer, although sympathetic, said Lincoln Police Department policy wouldn’t allow her to take the boy to the hospital."

The "her" in the excerpt is the police officer--not the mother. The police officer would not transport the child to the hospital. We most certainly did not prevent mom from taking the child to the hospital, which, under the circumstances, sounds like a pretty reasonable course of action.

As I explained to the child's mother, we do not think it is either safe or good public policy to transport people in acute mental health crises to hospitals or elsewhere restrained in the back seat of police cars, if this can be avoided. This practice poses known risks, and is also ethically dubious. For what other medical condition would the solution to a critical episode of the illness be to call the police? An asthma attack? Anaphylactic shock from an allergy? A severe diabetic reaction? I think not. As I told her, I believe her son needed an ambulance, medical professionals, and a hospital bed--not a set of handcuffs and the back seat of a patrol car.

I'll grant you this, though, if neither the mother nor the principal had the presence of mind to call an ambulance for this emergency, the police officer probably should have suggested it. We'll try to make sure we do that more reliably, when the care-givers don't think of it.