Every crime
fighter needs a sidekick. For Batman it was Robin. For Starsky it was
Hutch. For Sherlock Holmes it was Dr. Watson.
And if LAPD
Assistant Chief George Gascon gets his way, Los Angeles police officers
will soon have a new digital partner.
Named
COPLINK, it is a computer program that can do in minutes what would
take an LAPD detective weeks.
The system
makes many police databases detailing everything from arrests to gang
names to 911 calls work as one. COPLINK then sifts those millions
of pieces of information and produces connections from seemingly
insignificant pieces of data.
"This
technology can connect the dots in crimes like never before, and it will
save lives," said Gascon, who runs daily operations of the Los Angeles
Police Department.
The LAPD
maintains 20 databases. To search them all, officers must make separate
trips to various terminals. Some cannot search by phrases or words,
severely limiting their usefulness.
Gascon said
high-tech law enforcement tools such as COPLINK are the wave of the
future. Computer-assisted policing programs are part of a nationwide push
by law enforcement toward use of technology to make up for understaffed
police agencies.
Much like
militaries that use small strike forces equipped with high-technology
weapons to knock out larger, less sophisticated enemies, police are
turning to the keyboard over shoe leather to nab suspects.
COPLINK
is part of a new science of data-mining algorithms that allows a computer
to make high-speed connections that would take a human weeks. The systems,
Gascon said, provide a kind of instant institutional memory, like a
veteran detective who never forgets.
More than 100
agencies nationwide use COPLINK. The latest to sign up is the San
Diego Police Department, joining Boston, Minneapolis, Phoenix, all the
police agencies in Alaska, and the first agency, the Tucson Police
Department.
Rivals include
the aptly named Holmes II and Watson. Holmes II is used extensively by
British police agencies to combine data resources. Watson, according to
its designers, is used by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department to do
similar work.
COPLINK
was born in a university lecture room, the fortuitous result of a police
officer who went back to college.
In 1996,
Hsinchun Chen, director of the University of Arizona's artificial
intelligence laboratory, was discussing with students the ability to
consolidate vast amounts of information from disparate data sources.
A police
sergeant told Chen how his department faced a daily dilemma of trying to
combine data on suspects, vehicles, crimes, mug shots and gang
intelligence.
"For an
investigator to get a complete picture of a suspect, they would literally
have to go to a different terminal, and that would take a lot of time,"
said Bob Fund, COPLINK project manager.
"For the mug
shot, there were 10 terminals for the whole department, and you had to
stand in line and wait your turn."
So Chen -- who
has worked with the Department of Defense and CIA on records management --
and the Tucson police teamed up. With a grant from the National Institutes
of Justice, they leveraged the academic research into a practical
application. By 2000, the department had a working system and the research
had spawned a software patent and a business.
Fund likes to
cite the case of the Lucky Wishbone. That's the name of a fast-food
chicken chain in Tucson, which in 2000 became the favorite target of two
robbers. The men used masks on all but one occasion, when a witness
recognized one of them. But all the witness could recall was that the
suspect went by the moniker "Peanut," Fund said.
So, detectives
enlisted the software to link items in the department's databases on gang
affiliations, prison records and arrests and half a dozen other systems.
The system combined the nickname with a physical description of the
suspect.
The search not
only identified a suspect, but thanks to an interface with public records
databases, it produced his address. He was convicted of armed robbery.
Gascon said he
hopes to use it to search for crimes of a similar nature across a wide
area. "Most crimes are committed by a small group of criminals already in
our databases," he said.
Gascon said he
wants to add data from other Los Angeles County law enforcement databases
and share that information with those departments because criminals don't
follow jurisdictional boundaries.
Art Placencia,
a Hollywood homicide detective and president of the Latin American Law
Enforcement Assn., said his group thinks so highly of the proposal that it
too is lobbying businesses for dollars to buy the technology.
"I've spent 36
years on the department -- many of those years as a detective -- and this
would be a great investment," he said.
But given the
city budget crunch, the LAPD has been forced to turn to grants and private
funding for the $750,000 pilot program for the region.
"I want to get
this up and running by February," said Gascon, who recently took over as
chief of the LAPD's daily operations.
PHOTO: SMALL
WONDER: LAPD Det. Jeff Godown displays a laptop computer like the one used
with the COPLINK system that the department hopes to have operating
by February. The goal is to eventually make its 20 databases compatible
for quicker answers.;PHOTOGRAPHER: Brian Vander Brug Los Angeles Times
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