The usual suspects

One of the things that makes the Lincoln Police Department successful is the quality of our information systems. We put a huge amount of information at the fingertips of our employees in ways that are especially easy to use. Not so at many police departments. Some information that we take for granted at LPD is not available at all; or it’s closely held by specialized units; or it’s not easily accessible; or it’s disjointed in separate systems for gang intelligence, narcotics case files, evidence, arrests, missing persons, etc. etc. etc.. One of the key differences in our core records management system is that it is available to everyone on the department all the time. It’s both physically available in every office, at every substation, in every report room, etc., but also practically available: no special skills needed—if you can read the screen, you are in business.

We host a lot of visits (both in person and via the web) from other police agencies, and these visitors are always impressed and intrigued by our information systems. Whenever I really want to demonstrate its power, I use one of two tools: information by address, or past offenders. Information by address is a query whereby the user inputs a street address to bring back a list of records associated with that address, such as names or cases. When you put in an address and hit the “names” button, you immediately retrieve a table of every name collected in any police report (we’re talking millions) over the past 29 years where someone claimed this address as their residence. They are presented in reverse chronological order, with the most recent at the top, and you can drill into each for the details on the case or on the person and all we know about him or her. It’s incredible to think what you’ve just done in a matter of two or three seconds .

The other one I like to demo is past offenders. Input a few parameters, (gender, race, age range, height/weight range, and offense type) and you will retrieve a table of everyone arrested for that crime within the past 29 years who meets the criteria, complete with mugshot, if the arrest happened in the digital photo era. Each row contains the link to drill into the offenders details, all the way down to the case files, his associates, what he’s pawned, his traffic tickets, and so forth. It is incredibly rich, complete, and simple to use when you need to know who the usual suspects are for an armed robbery by a white female around 25 years old between 5’5'” and 5’8”. It is an eye-popper for out-of-town officers. Even if they have something like this available, it often requires some kind of hoop-jumping like a trip to the intelligence unit (hope their not at a conference, or it’s not 2:00 AM), and the search only goes back to the time they installed their “new” system a year or three ago.

Yesterday an acquaintance—also a data hound—sent me the link to Tampa Bay Mugshots, a somewhat similar concept on a public website at the St. Petersburg Times, created (at least in part--I don't know who else is involved) by a former University of Nebraska Daily Nebraskan reporter Matt Waite, who graduated from UNL in around 1996. He was just getting into data analysis back then, with an impressive story analyzing neighborhood crime statistics we provided him. Now he is on the cutting edge of “computer-aided reporting.” This is a remarkable application of web and database technology that pretty much duplicates what we offer—albeit for 60 days, not 29 years. I was particularly impressed by the roll-over/drill-down bar graphs.

Click on the mugs to drill into the offenders a couple notches. The three Tampa Bay area Sheriff's Offices use the same concept we do for integrating their mugshots from their digital imaging system, the data from their Records Management System, and bringing it all back together for display as an .html page in a browser.