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Police
Agencies Pool Resources
to Fight Crime
by Jim
Walsh
The Arizona Republic
09/29/07
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East Valley police agencies are heading into
a new dimension of police work, pooling their resources at the new East
Valley Gang and Crime Information Fusion Center to share information
more efficiently and solve crimes faster.
Launched Sept. 1, detectives from Mesa, Tempe, Chandler, Gilbert, Tempe
and Scottsdale work together to track gangs and crime trends that cross
city borders. They issue bulletins every two weeks to participating
agencies and hope to create a cops-only Intranet site to share
information daily.
"We're going to collect a lot of data that traditionally does not get
collected, or does not get analyzed," Mesa Police Chief George Gascón
said. "We'll be able to a connect the dots and predict the likelihood of
crimes occurring again."
The center is Gascón's brainchild. He said he started mentioning the
concept to other East Valley chiefs about eight or nine months ago and
it was an easy sell because everyone recognized the value of
high-quality, timely intelligence.
Gascón said the center will help identify more serial criminals by
spotting trends previously overlooked and that sharing information
should help police protect the public better by making arrests faster.
Mesa Detective Lance Heivilin said the system already has paid
dividends, even though it's still in its infancy. He said a Gilbert
officer had a routine conversation with a gang member and obtained an
address that helped a Chandler detective track down a gangster.
"We're working on several high-profile investigations and that's
assistance we couldn't have done a month ago," Heivilin said.
In the past, information was shared on an informal basis, generally with
a detective from one agency calling another in a different city to see
if they had a similar crime trend.
Gascón said that's not good enough in today's world.
"If you leave it up to an informal network, it's too random," he said.
"You have to have a system to make sure the sharing of information takes
place."
Eventually, everyone with the participating agencies will have access to
the same database. Detectives in the Fusion Center, based at Mesa police
headquarters, now have access to all agencies' data in one location for
the first time.
"It's a different approach. We recognized we had to try something new.
We have to work together collectively," said Mesa Sgt. Kevin Baggs, who
supervises the center. "We don't purposely not share. It's just that it
hasn't been logistically easy."
In November, the center also will have access to COPLINK, a powerful
research tool for police that not only taps into the databases of
numerous law enforcement agencies, but also analyzes the information to
generate lists of potential suspects. More than 600 agencies nationwide
have adopted the program since its creation in 2002.
Developed by a Knowledge Computing Corporation of Tucson, it is
described as a "Google for law enforcement" on the company's Web site
and already is used in Arizona by the Phoenix and Tucson police and the
Maricopa County Sheriff's Office.
Bob Griffin, the company's president and CEO, said the software analyzes
pieces of vague information and finds similarities used to identify
suspects.
"The reason COPLINK has been as successful as it's been is that 80
percent of the crime is committed by 20 percent of the population," he
said. "The suspect might not be in your databank but he's in someone
else's databank."
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