Erlanger Kentucky Police Department Captures Critical Data to Fight Crime

Law Enforcement Agency Uses Technology to Protect Citizens

A police siren blasts into the night after a 911 call reports a car speeding recklessly through downtown. The officer goes into high pursuit and stops the car. A quick search of the license plate number on the patrol car's computer reveals a hit-and-run report earlier in the day from a neighboring city. That report has only a partial license number, but those numbers match the numbers in the latest incident, plus the car shows suspicious body damage. In a matter of minutes a suspect in two distant crimes is apprehended through a small piece of shared data.

This kind of scenario is becoming common in Northern Kentucky, where the Erlanger Police Department has used Information Builders' WebFOCUS Magnify software to generate real-time search results for police officers in the field, in conjunction with key performance indicators (KPIs) for supervisors at headquarters. A unique combination of business intelligence (BI) and search technology, Magnify enables officers to locate and share data that was formerly kept in paper files and not shared beyond precinct boundaries.

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 that they occurred. Drilling down, officers can obtain reports that list all the pertinent information about each incident.

Forging Connections Among Agencies

Police Chief Mark Fields says the primary motivation for this project was a desire to share information among multiple agencies. Historically, the Erlanger Police Department used mapping and statistical data systems developed in-house to provide information to patrol officers and supervisors. Neighboring cities were using other systems and many police records were stored in filing cabinets. While criminals crossed back and forth over city boundaries, the information about their crimes stayed within the individual cities, often out of reach when it was needed most.

"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 Chief Fields. "That's what these software tools do for us."

Law enforcement personnel in ten cities throughout Northern Kentucky can now share up-to-date information. It's not just data sharing, but timely data sharing that is important. For example, using this information system, the Erlanger PD 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 the 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.

"Getting current information out of this system is practically instantaneous," Fields emphasizes. "That's what makes this tool so effective on the street. Old data does us no good in the cars."

The police department was motivated to develop the BI system by a recent upswing in crime that was stretching police resources to the limit following several years of declines. "If we can work smarter and do more work with less people, we can avoid raising taxes or hiring additional personnel," Fields adds.

Casting a Wider Net of Information

Chief Fields recalls a recent string of burglaries involving iron and steel from around the county - everything from wrought-iron gates to sewer covers went missing. Because these crimes were so widespread, individual police departments didn't know there was a pattern until some of the stolen goods turned up at a recycling center and all of the jurisdictions learned of the news.

If that same situation were to occur today, an officer could just enter a keyword such as "metal" or "iron" into the Magnify search index and all of these related incidents would be linked in a one-page report.

Erlanger PD first learned about Information Builders' WebFOCUS BI platform through the Erlanger Area Planning Commission. With help from Information Builders Professional Services, they implemented an information system that merges data from 10 neighboring cities and 19 government agencies. The system enables officers to search crime records and incident reports stretching back over five years. 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.

"Information Builders took the time to listen to our needs and developed a solution that matches\ the way our organization works," says Steve Castor, PSCC manager, Erlanger Police Department. "We didn't have to adjust our procedures to the way their products work. We now have an intelligent crime-fighting tool that is helping us boost productivity and ultimately save lives."

KPIs Via an Integrated Crime Portal

Castor believes the new application is unique because of the way it presents information for two different audiences: a powerful search engine helps officers run simple queries from their patrol cars, delivering ranked listings of relevant information, while a BI portal displays KPIs of current crime activity, types of incidents, and trends to investigators at headquarters. Data is stored in a SQL Server database at the Erlanger Area Planning Commission.

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. Integration technology from iWay Software, an Information Builders company, updates the search index every 15 minutes with crime records from Erlanger's Computer Aided Dispatch and Records Management systems. WebFOCUS Magnify taps into these records and rapidly scans indexed content to create Google-style results, transforming them into usable information and preparing them for searching by end users.

Meanwhile, dispatchers and supervisors can view a different slice of this crime data through the department's new crime portal, which is anchored by a geographic information system (GIS). Created with WebFOCUS and ESRI's Arc/IMS, the portal displays a real-time view of incidents, arrests, 911 calls, and other events occurring throughout the dispatch area. It includes dashboards for displaying and drilling down into KPIs such as crime activity by city, current crime alerts, and a summary of arrests and incidents sorted by categories, such as arson, assault, burglary, and criminal mischief. GIS maps allow officers to view specific types of crime for a given area and perform crime mapping and statistical analysis functions. Officers can view maps of crime density hot spots by location or crime type, such as car theft, to see specific incidents within a zip code, neighborhood, city district, or other user-defined area.

"The KPIs and map work together to provide a unified view of the crime data," Castor explains. "Each interactive dashboard includes fields for drilling down into the data via parameters specified by the user, so you can enrich the map with facts about criminal activities and incidents as they occur."

Better Reports for Supervisors

WebFOCUS provides Erlanger with a comprehensive BI environment for collecting, analyzing, and integrating data, while providing historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Integrated reporting and analysis allows supervisors to determine better management of their organization, improve services, identify effective strategies, enhance security, and increase efficiency.

For example, Chief Fields receives the Daily Resource Forecast report at the start of each shift to determine if he has sufficient personnel on hand to cover heavy crime areas. Other reports help sergeants review a breakdown of activity during the previous 16 hours. Yet another report, delivered 30 minutes before the end of each shift, gives the sergeant a summary of the previous eight hours of activity. Officers can also access data on their BlackBerrys prior to arriving for duty, getting a preview of what to expect when they begin their shifts. WebFOCUS ReportCaster automatically delivers these reports to key personnel.

The system can also integrate data for weather, events, time of day, case history, associated suspects, and aerial photos. Officers receive the most up-to-date information available, along with predictions of crime hot spots before each shift. Data from the RMS is integrated and analyzed on a continuous basis. The end result is a sophisticated data model of criminal activity with a user-defined set of elements that predict future criminal behavior.

"We are experiencing improved law enforcement and prevention in Erlanger with the new system," Castor says. "Without this tool we would not be aware, for example, if a string of burglaries occurred in a block across our city boundary in a neighboring city. But now if we see reports of such activity, we can send a unit to patrol our city streets that border the area where the burglaries occurred. We can potentially prevent a crime where in the past we would probably be responding to a crime after the fact."

Soon, Erlanger's citizens will also be able to access some of this information via a public-facing Web site, so they can check on crime occurring in their neighborhoods. Fields hopes this encourages citizen input as well. "Once people are more in touch with crimes in their neighborhoods, they will be more likely to report clues and suspicious behavior."

Conclusion

The Erlanger Police Department has taken a big step forward in its quest to improve police services for the community and surrounding area. With 19 agencies in 10 cities accessing data from a single database, the various organizations are in sync. Officers have real-time search results for police officers in the field, KPIs and trends for supervisors and dispatchers, a dynamic visualization of GIS data, and automatic report creation and distribution.

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.

"Our IT department is very small and specialized," Castor notes. "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."