By Tad Simons, Provided by Thomson Reuters
Police departments around the country are often under intense pressure to locate criminals, even though they may have very little information to go on, and few solid clues. Speed is also crucial, particularly in abductions or other situations where a victim’s life may be on the line.
When the need for fast, accurate information is paramount, many police departments turn to investigative software to provide answers they can’t get any other way. Read four unique applications of data technology and how they positively changed the outcome of an investigation.
Cases Closed
In Springfield, Mass., for example, police used Thomson Reuters CLEAR® to track down a dangerous sexual predator using only the perpetrator’s first name and, as it turned out, an incorrect street address.
Using only a name and a suspected cellphone number, the Detroit police department used CLEAR to locate a woman who had abducted an 11-month-old child, resolving an amber-alert case in less than seven hours.
When a husband-wife team of terrorists in San Bernardino, Calif., attacked a conference of health-department employees, killing 14 and wounding 22 others, officials used CLEAR to search vehicle, property, and employment records to identify the address where the couple was ultimately arrested.
And in the small town of Prior Lake, Minn., police used CLEAR to see through a smokescreen of false identities, inaccurate information, and subterfuge in order to apprehend a criminal who had been eluding authorities for six years.
Smart-Search Intuition
In each of these cases, the police departments were able to utilize robust search capabilities in different ways, leveraging intelligent tools that not only search for needles of relevant information in vast haystacks of data, but also organize and prioritize that information in a way that makes deeper connections and associations possible. Indeed, one of the reasons CLEAR is so valuable to law enforcement is that it can compare disparate and seemingly unrelated data points to suggest connections that might otherwise go unnoticed.
In the case of the Springfield sexual predator, for instance, Crime Analyst Cristina Fernandez had only a first name and a possible address to work with. Nevertheless, she was able to
compare a list of similar names provided by CLEAR with information she had already gleaned from social media, narrowing down her search dramatically.
“CLEAR has such a robust search ability that, even using just minimal pieces of information, I can usually generate a list of names and at least it’s a starting point,” Fernandez says. In this case, CLEAR gave her 12 names, one of which turned out to be the perpetrator.
In Detroit, the Amber Alert situation facing police was made even more urgent by the fact that the abducted infant had sickle-cell anemia and needed regular medication. In that case, past utility records provided several possible addresses for the suspect, who was the child’s biological mother. The key piece of information came from a cellphone number the woman had once used, which was registered to someone at an unfamiliar address—a friend, as it turned out, who was harboring the fugitive and the stolen baby.
In San Bernardino, time was of the essence because a pair of armed suspects who had just killed 14 people were on the loose. The suspects fled the scene in a black SUV with Utah plates, but the license number indicated that the car was a rental. The name on the car-rental application matched the name of an employee in the organization that was attacked—one who, a witness said, had briefly attended the event but left angry—immediately making him a person of interest. By cross-referencing the rental-car data with cellphone records, police identified an apartment in Redlands to investigate. The shooters, a husband-and-wife team, were apprehended nearby within hours of the incident.
And in Minnesota, a lying and uncooperative suspect was revealed as a criminal when the only true piece of information he provided—an address—allowed police to connect him to a string of burglaries across six states. If the Prior Lake police department didn’t have CLEAR, officer Chris Schaefer says, “he would have been handed a citation and walked out of jail.”
No Info, No Problem
Time and time again, what CLEAR customers find is that the software’s access to both public and proprietary databases, including difficult-to-find real-time data, often yields surprisingly fast, accurate results—even if there is very little information to go on.
Reflecting back on her experience in Springfield, Mass., Crime Analyst Fernandez says she was amazed at how much CLEAR was able to turn up based on just a first name and an incorrect street address. “CLEAR really nailed it. Even though the street was wrong, it was still smart enough to know that, and was able to generate a list we could work with.”
In Detroit, real-time cellphone data is what ultimately allowed police to locate a child abductor in less than seven hours. According to Sergeant Jason Sloan, who was on the scene: “We need things up-to-date. Now. That’s what saves lives.”
To catch the terrorists its midst, the San Bernadino Police Department was able to cross-reference employee records with real-time vehicle and cellphone data to identify a likely
location where the shooters might be hiding. And in Prior Lake, Minn., CLEAR’s capabilities allowed a small, under-staffed police department to do some big-time detective work in order to apprehend a wanted fugitive.
“[CLEAR] is like a super program,” says officer Chris Schaefer. “It seems like there is an infinite amount of data in there, and it’s very user-friendly, too. The more that we use it here, the more comfortable we get with it. It makes things a lot easier for us in our job, and it’s saved us time.”
Help is Only a Keystroke Away
CLEAR was developed specifically to help police departments do their job. But what officers in the field often find is that they don’t appreciate CLEAR’s true capabilities until they are faced with an emergency situation and CLEAR is the only tool that can help them. Countless cases have been solved either directly or indirectly from information uncovered by a CLEAR search. And the more police departments around the country use it, the more impressed they are by its capabilities. Emergency situation or not, CLEAR helps police departments of all sizes do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
As Prior Lake officer Chris Schaefer notes, “It goes to show, this program has a place in a big department or small. The database works in different areas of law enforcement and it can be very helpful to even the small agencies and the regular street officer who’s investigating everything from a major crime to a small crime.”
No matter the size of the department or the urgency of the crime, CLEAR is often the difference between a successful investigation and a criminal who gets away.
