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Forging a
Link:
COPLINK®
plugs investigators
into several data sources
with
one query
11/03 ---
GOVtech.net
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Cops investigating a
series of robberies of fried chicken franchises in Tucson, Ariz., got a
break -- a female witness recognized one of the assailants as a man she
knew as "Peanut." Tucson police used COPLINK®
-- a specialized software package allowing users to search different
criminal databases simultaneously -- and found several people associated
with the nickname Peanut. When they tied the nickname to a tattoo the
witness also saw, they soon located a name and address for a suspect, who
quickly found himself behind bars.
In another case, a man was found face down in a parking lot after getting
run over by a car, shot and having his throat slashed. He was still alive
and told the responding officers, "Shorty did it," adding that Shorty had
a tattoo of the name "Caesar" on his forearm. When Tucson police ran that
information through COPLINK®,
they came up with a suspect who had been released from state prison just
24 hours earlier. COPLINK®
also revealed a connection between the attacker and victim -- both had
been arrested several times on drug-related charges -- leading police to
hypothesize the incident resulted from a drug deal gone bad. With COPLINK®
a digital mug book was generated on a laptop and shown to the victim as he
lay in his hospital bed. He fingered Shorty, who was soon sporting jail
garb.
Cops in Tucson say they are excited about the system's ability to search
disparate databases with one query. "It's the best thing we've had in
years," said Detective Tim Peterson of the Tucson Police Department.
Connecting the Dots
Before COPLINK®,
officers had to access several separate databases, including records
management databases and any number of homegrown databases -- such as
gang, court citation, jail management, sex offender and probation systems.
The problem was that access required specialized key strokes or key
assignments. COPLINK®
connects all those systems and allows access with a single query.
"It puts all of this information in one easy-to-locate place that doesn't
require any specialized key strokes or key assignments or special
knowledge," said Peterson. "It's like any other Windows application that
I'm used to doing." As far as potential misuse, Peterson said COPLINK®'s
administrative tools provide a quick and simple way to check on who makes
queries and why.
The technology migrates data from a wide range of databases and records
management systems, and consolidates it into an information warehouse for
law enforcement to access.
"Records management systems were spawned out of need for crime statistic
reporting to the federal government," said Bob Griffin, president of
Knowledge Computing Corp. (KCC), which markets COPLINK®.
Griffin noted that the systems have evolved into more operational
databases and that all of the databases are on separate platforms.
Association-detection algorithms within
COPLINK® also allow
investigators to detect people, places and things with which a suspect has
associated. "If I'm not able to locate him at any of his previous
addresses, I can run his associated people and locations and come up with
additional information -- where I might begin to talk to people to find
out where he might be," Peterson said.
Griffin said because an integrated and consolidated warehouse has been
built, "We can now apply our relationship and detection algorithms to the
data, so we can determine things like physical relationships or hidden
relationships." A recent case in which a little girl was snatched
demonstrated the value of COPLINK®'s
ability to detect "hidden" relationships. The girl and two friends were
playing in a park and were approached by two men in a red car. One man
said his name was "Wado," and asked if the girl would help him find his
lost puppy. She got in the car with the two men and they disappeared. Her
friends told police about the red car, the name Wado and that the men were
white or Hispanic. Police entered those variables into the COPLINK®
system and found a white Ford pickup had a relationship to all those
variables -- it was involved in a hit-and-run accident with a red vehicle
driven by the man who turned out to be Wado.
Information Hubs
COPLINK® has been
deployed in nearly a dozen locations throughout the country, including
Boston; Phoenix, Ariz.; Pima County, Ariz.; Ann Arbor, Mich.; Redmond,
Wash.; Spokane, Wash.; Montgomery County, Md.; Henderson County, N.C.; and
Huntsville, Texas. In some locations, COPLINK®
created regional "information hubs," such as in Polk County, Iowa, which
is linked, via COPLINK®,
to seven surrounding counties. The same thing is in the works in Arizona,
where Tucson and Phoenix will link to San Diego, Calif.'s Automated
Reporting Justice Information System (ARJIS), according to Griffin.
"We're taking the information that's in the ARJIS database, importing it
into COPLINK® and
attaching that node to Phoenix, Tucson and Pima County, so we'll have all
the border states pretty well covered," Griffin said. "Once we've got all
this information built into a COPLINK®
node, when you are searching COPLINK®,
you are searching across all of those disparate data sources at one time."
The immediate goal of KCC is to establish regional information sharing.
The long-term goal is to develop multijurisdictional, and eventually
national, information sharing. Griffin said the average county or city can
procure COPLINK®
for about a $7,500 hardware investment. Users need a server, about 1 GB of
memory for the "algorithmic crunching" and high-speed disk drives. The
base price includes one data source integrated into the system. There is
an added expense for each additional data source a jurisdiction adds to
its node. The pricing, however, depends on the jurisdiction's size and
number of sworn officers.
Griffin said most clients begin with two to four data sources, and most
data sources are criminal databases, such as gang databases. Some
jurisdictions have added hunting and fishing licensees, and utility
customers. "The reason they put the utility bills in there is that people
may give a lot of aliases, but not on their utility bills or hunting or
fishing licenses," Griffin said, adding that KCC has yet to find a data
source with which COPLINK®
is not compatible. "We tell folks that we're data source agnostic, and we
truly are.
"We've developed a set of tools that allows us to read the original data
source, and then through drag-and-drop mapping, we can map the fields from
the original data source into the COPLINK® node," he said.
Peterson said he is eager to connect with other jurisdictions and agencies
in the area to demonstrate the system's potential. "It allows such
flexibility in searches that it can present an investigator with
investigative leads that they wouldn't have had otherwise," he said.
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