Cross-country complaint

The caller on Monday was obviously disgruntled. She had been speaking to a staff member in our Accounting Unit, who was serving as telephone backup on my personal office line. Apparently directory assistance, asked for the phone number of the Lincoln Police Department, had given the caller the number for the chief’s office (a common aggravation), rather than the general police non-emergency number.

When I sensed that Rhonda was a little frustrated, I took the call. The miffed caller was in North Carolina. She had been following a semi tractor-trailer that was driving poorly. She had gathered the name of the trucking firm from the tractor door, and called the company. It was a leased rig, and the Ohio leasing firm representative was not the least bit interested in her first-hand report of bad driving. She was inquiring in a sarcastic tone whether I would be more responsive.

The Nebraska link was the words “Cornhusker Ultra-Lite” on the trailer. “Is there any other Cornhusker?,” she snippily asked. I explained to her that the trailer may have been manufactured in Lincoln, but that the driver and/or lessee would have nothing to do with my fair City. What she was doing was akin to calling the police chief in Stuttgart to complain about the driver of a Volkswagen.

That didn’t seem to gruntle her. I asked if she had thought about calling the local authorities in North Carolina, perhaps the county sheriff or the State police. After giving me her personal opinion that the Raleigh Police Department was the only agency in the state you could count on to do anything, I thanked her for being a public-minded North Carolinian, and we parted ways.

The hard life

Last Friday, Dr. Donna Akers, and associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Nebraska came by my office to visit about research she is undertaking. Dr. Akers is interested in human trafficking. We discussed the potential for using Lincoln data as part of her research.

Hard though it may be for most Lincoln residents to believe, we indeed have some cases involving human trafficking in our city. These are situations where women are being coerced into prostitution, or where runaway girls are being forced to participate in “survival sex.” The crimes that come to police attention are rare, but not unknown.

While Dr. Akers was here, I was showing her how we might gather some information. I clicked on a couple of prostitution arrests, and showed her the police contact history on these two subjects. After she left, I did a little research of my own. I selected ten women arrested within the past decade for prostitution who are now between the ages of 20 and 35 and who have resided in Lincoln for at least ten years.

These women have lived the hard life. The ten subjects have a combined record of 105 runaway reports, 44 child abuse/neglect cases, and 35 sexual assaults prior to their 19th birthday. Those are only the reported incidents that came to the attention of the Lincoln Police Department.

Makes you wonder

From the dispatch log yesterday at 1427 hours, Antelope Park 3101 A Street:

IN THE SHELTER CLOSEST TO PLAYGROUND, LRG GROUP OF PPL DRESSED LIKE PIRATES HAVE SOMETHING IN ONE OF THE GRILLS ON FIRE, MAKING A LOT OF SMOKE AND SMELLS LIKE BURNING RUBBER

Spring has sprung

2007

2008

2009

I could twitter if I really wanted too.

Daily news briefing

This is a topic I’ve broached before, but not in quite this detail. Every weekday morning at 0845, the police department hosts a news media briefing at headquarters. The reporters gather in a room specially designed for this function near the lobby. It’s equipped with an LCD projector, a computer, a podium, flags, and a white board. If you’re a Lincoln resident, you’ve seen it in the background of lots of interviews with police-types over the past ten years.

Our public information officer, Officer Katie Flood (who wears several other hats) provides the reporters with printouts of public record information about each police incident report and citation/arrest within the previous 24 hours. She briefs the media about the most significant overnight crimes, and depending on what mayhem has occurred, an interview on tape may follow. The Sheriff or his representative stops in and does the same, and the whole affair is normally over within 20 or 30 minutes.

On my first day as chief in 1994, Margaret Reist from the Lincoln Journal and Bruce Weible from the Lincoln Star composed the media corps. It was a sum total of two. Today, we are likely to have seven or eight: the Lincoln Journal Star, KFOR radio, KLIN radio, the Omaha World Herald, KOLN/KGIN TV, KLKN TV, and KETV TV. During the school year, we’ll also have the Daily Nebraskan, and once or twice a week we also get a visit from KPTM TV and KMTV TV.

The daily briefing, however, is hardly the only contact we have with the news media. They will continue to call through the day with additional questions, or as new events unfold. In the evening, the Journal Star’s evening police beat reporter will stop down at headquarters for a face-to-face with the second shift duty commander, and there will be calls from TV stations through the evening until the 10:00 PM newscasts. It starts up again around 4:30 AM, as the radio stations, TV stations, and the Journal Star check in to gather their stories for drive time.

This has changed dramatically. The news media is so much more pervasive and competitive today, and the beat never stops. Even the newspapers now must be fed constantly throughout the day, as their online editions change throughout the day.

I know that LPD was conducting this daily briefing when I started my career, but it’s even older than I realized—at least one hundred years. Last week, the grand daughter of Chief F. J. Rickard stopped at HQ, and gave us some copies of his news clipping file. The newspaper reports confirm that essentially the same morning briefing was occurring at police headquarters in 1909, and in one article (dated June 2, 1909), it is referred to as a “time honored” routine.

(Sigh) II

Used that title up previously, too. The names have been changed to protect the identity of those involved. Click images to enlarge.

The upholstered furniture ordinance is part of the Housing Code, normally enforced by the Building & Safety Department. I shouldn’t whine about this, because I truly believe that taking care of minor quality of life issues like this really does help in the long run. It just seems so odd to have police officers doing this. But we’re here 24/7/365—unlike the rest of government. So, I’m over it. The law’s the law. Just to show everyone that I’m taking this seriously, I’ve done some analysis on crimes involving couches during 2008 and 2009 year-to-date:

Alerts to schools and parks

One of the more interesting bits of technology we have availed ourselves of in recent years has been the Threshold Alert, a feature of CrimeView, our geographic crime analysis software from the Omega Group. I’ve described Threshold Alerts and how we use them in previous posts. This spring, while I was attending the Omega Group’s annual users’ conference, an idea suddenly struck me. The company’s software and services target three industries: fire departments (FireView), police departments (CrimeView) and school districts (School Planner.) All three domains were represented at the conference, and I was rubbing shoulders with some of the school district participants when it hit me.

Here was the thought: why not send a Threshold Alert to school district personnel? When I got back to Lincoln, I emailed the head of security at the Lincoln Public Schools, sent him a sample, and asked him if there might be any interest in receiving this on a regular basis. He was in my office a couple of days later, and since that time I have been sending a daily report to him and to Student Services with the details on each Lincoln Police Incident Report concerning incidents that occurred at public schools on the previous day.

I had a similar thought a couple weeks later. Mayor Beutler had asked me about the police calls at a specific City park. I provided the information about police incidents at that park, and I also looked at a few similar parks for comparison purposes. It struck me that the Parks & Recreation Department Director might be interested in a weekly Threshold Alert, just so he didn’t miss any of these. I created two for him: all police dispatches to parks, and police Incident Reports of incidents occurring at parks. I am running these on a weekly, rather than daily basis, so he gets the snapshot on Mondays.

I think both Lincoln Public Schools and the Parks & Recreation Department were probably already aware of most of the events documented in these reports. Nonetheless, it’s a nice double-check, and with the automated process it really doesn’t require any significant effort to deliver this nice daily or weekly summary to their inbox. It would, of course, be a pretty simple matter for an individual principal, park superintendant, business owner, landlord, or resident to create their own version of this using Crime Alerts—another tool from the Omega Group that is part of the crimemapping.com website—just by selecting the address of interest and the smallest possible buffer, 500 feet. In Lincoln, that would give you the significant crimes within a radius of about a block and a half.

The death of common sense

I filled in as the first shift commander on Saturday. At 1500 hours, Sgt. Michon Morrow relieved me, and I changed into street clothes and headed home. My portable radio was laying on the front seat, and I hadn’t turned it off. I was thinking ahead of a lawn to be mowed and a brew to be consumed when a radio transmission caught my attention.

Officer Mike Schaaf was being detailed to a drug treatment center on a missing person report. The dispatcher gave him the description of the person, then said something to the effect of, “We don’t have a name, the caller said she couldn’t provide that because it is confidential.” Did I hear that right? I called Mike on the radio and took him to a side channel: no, I wasn’t hallucinating. I asked him to shoot me an email later with the details.

Apparently the employee was unwilling to provide the client’s name due to her concern that this would be a violation of the The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—the dreaded HIPAA. It’s not, by the way, but that’s what she was worried about. Officer Schaaf ultimately convinced her that it would be difficult to investigate a missing person without knowing who the person was, and all was well.

I really don’t mean to criticize the employee, it just seems to me to be a good example of a more widespread phenomenon. Rules, regulations, computer programs, and protocols just can’t replace sound judgment by reasonable people who are willing to make a decision and stand by it. This is not to say that discretion shouldn’t be guided by regulations, or that the computer program’s recommendation isn’t a valuable resource. At the end of the day, though, there has be a person who exercises old-fashioned common sense—something that seems to be in short supply these days.

Ever made the tactical error of flipping out three pennies after the cashier had already pressed the “enter” key?