Fighting Crime With WebFOCUS Magnify

Officers in the Erlanger, Kentucky Police Department use a business intelligence system – built on Information Builders WebFOCUS Magnify – to analyze current crime activity from their patrol cars.

Search Index Gives Erlanger Police Officers Instant Insight From Patrol Cars, Backed By KPIs at Headquarters

China’s relentless industrial expansion had an unexpected impact on criminal activity in the quiet suburban community of Erlanger, Kentucky. At first, Police Chief Marc Fields was mystified. The seasoned commander of 42 officers couldn’t figure out why everything from wrought-iron fences to sewer covers started to disappear. Because these burglaries were spread across several jurisdictions throughout northern Kentucky, individual police departments didn’t detect a pattern – until some of the stolen goods turned up at a recycling center, which informed all the jurisdictions. The motivation behind the burglaries, it turned out, was the rising cost of contraband iron in rapidly developing countries.

Today, says Fields, if that same situation were to occur, all he would have to do is enter a keyword such as "metal" or "iron" into a simple search index, and all of the related incidents would be linked in a one-page report. That’s because the Erlanger Police Department is now using Information Builders WebFOCUS Magnify, a unique combination of BI and search technology that enables Chief Fields and his team to locate and share data from 10 neighboring cities and 19 government agencies – providing them all with the ability to instantly connect seemingly unrelated incidents.

Magnify uses a familiar search paradigm that all Internet users understand. Officers connect to the system through cellular-powered displays in their vehicles. Entering a brief search string returns header information followed by a narrative about the incidents in the order they occurred. Drilling down, officers can obtain reports that list all the pertinent information about each incident – chronicled from precinct records and incident reports stretching back over five years.

Erlanger’s system begins with free-form, Google-style searches and then reaches into the associated transactions and databases to find additional information. It groups related information so each officer can easily narrow down results and filter large data sets. This is especially important for a small department that does not have the resources to hire experienced system analysts – let alone to monitor the price of iron on the world’s black markets.

"We had to have a tool that would let us dig into our historical databases, as well as integrate real-time information about crimes, arrests, and incidents that are taking place all the time," says Fields. "Getting current information out of Magnify is practically instantaneous. That’s what makes it so effective on the street. Old data does us no good in the cars."

Magnify relies on iWay integration technology to update Erlanger’s search index every 15 minutes with crime records from the city’s Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system and Records Management System (RMS). All cities and agencies connected to the system input their respective police record data. Officers can also enter notes into the system directly from the field. Data is stored in a Microsoft SQL Server database at the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission.

"Providing a simple, uniform, and interactive search experience helps users navigate through years of police records and quickly make connections," says Steve Castor, PSCC manager, Erlanger Police Department. "Users can choose one or two of the search results and run a detailed report."

Case in Point

The mobile search system is particularly valuable to patrol officers in the field, where a simple search for a license plate number could uncover transactions across multiple data sources and law enforcement organizations. It’s easy to tie those results back to a WebFOCUS report that presents a history of the registered owner of the vehicle.

When working on a case, the law enforcement agent typically progresses through and with the tool in the following ways. First, an officer enters information that is characteristic of a particular case – for example, a license plate number – in a WebFOCUS Magnify-based search. This will return a list of database transactions that would include, in this example, a string of plate numbers and a list of the associated data sources.

Next, the officer might click on a data source item to reveal the database records from which these search results were derived. The officer would uncover a number of pertinent records culled from various databases as well as Officer Activity Reports about a particular offense. From there, the officer can check on a particular individual’s arrest history to further narrow the search. This would return the complete record of the incident.

A Distinguished Service Record

While other search tools are good at indexing content, they lack Magnify’s unparalleled ability to access hundreds of different data types and to link search results to a full-fledged business intelligence (BI) environment. Most enterprise search products were created to crawl Web content and be proficient with HTML pages and file directories. These search tools primarily index and query unstructured data, taking a broad approach to finding data and delivering multiple possible results rather than delivering exact answers.

Magnify inherits the rich data-access pedigree of Information Builders and iWay Software, which have spent more than 30 years developing native adapters to popular applications and databases as well as one of the world’s leading business intelligence (BI) environments. This marriage of integration, search, and BI tools brings together three powerful technologies dedicated to the discovery and analysis of data. While other search tools crawl, index, and retrieve just about any kind of information, they fall short when it’s time to decide what to do with it because they don’t offer analysis capabilities, such as statistical methods or trend analysis, for organizing and gleaning insight from information. Plus, it’s much more difficult to connect them with a diverse set of backend data types, formats, and applications.

As Erlanger has learned, Magnify lets people find the right structured information, then organize and manipulate it in a way that aids analysis and decision-making. Combining search and BI technologies creates a solution that provides more than either technology could by itself, delivering insight to a wide community of users who aren’t familiar with structured query languages and complicated BI interfaces. It also allows them to expand natural language searches to conduct numeric analysis.

In short, the Magnify search tool is as easy to use as any Web search engine, but much more powerful. Users can easily locate key facts through simple keyword searches, and then follow links to execute reports and access information in the format of their choice, including Microsoft Excel, Adobe PDF, HTML, or XML.

Applied Analytics

Fields acknowledges these technical achievements, but he prefers to focus on the benefits this technology brings to northern Kentucky’s law enforcement efforts. Authorized personnel in 10 cities now share up-to-date information via an integrated reporting and analysis system that helps the department improve police services, identify effective strategies, enhance security, and increase efficiency. In addition to having a tremendously useful search tool, Erlanger worked with Information Builders to devise a BI portal that provides key performance indicators (KPIs) for supervisors, dynamic visualization of geographic data, and automatic report creation and distribution. Search terms are fed to the WebFOCUS BI platform as parameters that automatically trigger reports.

Using the search index, a patrol officer was able to quickly resolve an indecent exposure call. While still in the field, the officer in charge looked back over previous indecent exposure cases and identified those suspects who had already been arrested. Eliminating suspects shortened the investigation, which could have taken two or three days without access to this data.

"The timeliness of the data not only resulted in a shortened investigation but also eliminated the necessity of pulling other personnel from their respective cases to do the research," notes Castor. "We now have an intelligent crime-fighting tool that is helping us boost productivity and ultimately save lives."

What’s the lesson for other police departments and law enforcement agencies? With the right combination of search, integration, and business intelligence software, even small agencies can acquire cutting-edge technology that was formerly the domain of much larger police departments. According to Castor, the Erlanger Police Department has had quite a lot of interest in this project from other police departments all around the country and from as far away as Mexico.

"By leveraging this current repository of information, officers can respond to calls with more knowledge in hand, and supervisors can deploy the force in a way that best serves the community," Castor sums up. "Our IT department is very small and specialized. We don’t have many resources to devote to implementing new information systems. We couldn’t have done it without the amazing support we got from Information Builders."