COUNTYWIDE : 7 Cities Will Seek Crime-Net Grant

Police departments in seven Orange County cities have agreed to jointly seek a state grant for a program that would enable them to more effectively share crime information.

Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Newport Beach, Seal Beach and Westminster will introduce a joint proposal for $1.85 million in state matching funds to establish a regional Crime Analysis Unit.

The funding is being sought under the state’s 13-year-old Career Criminal Apprehension Program, which aims to help law-enforcement agencies identify, arrest and prosecute habitual criminals.

By focusing on and categorizing crime trends and sharing that information, police officers will be better equipped to track down offenders who commit similar crimes in different cities, police officials said.

The program would provide four one-year grants to the cities, each of which would match that money. The grant money would be apportioned according to each city’s population and crime rates. If the funding is approved, the seven police departments will upgrade their computer and communication systems to make them more compatible and efficient.

“The idea is to process crime data and make it more useful and timely to the officer on the street,” said Huntington Beach Police Chief Ronald E. Lowenberg. “Where you have a criminal moving from city to city, we need to do a better job. We do a decent job now, but we need to do a better job.”

While officers now often use crime information from other cities that may be weeks old, they could receive and exchange data weekly or even daily under the proposed program, Lowenberg said.

The means of communicating that information would also make it easier for officers to interpret, he said. For example, rather than circulating photocopies of wanted posters, the departments could send an automated bulletin by computer. Or, instead of merely receiving a description of a suspect’s car, an officer could view a computer screen showing a picture of the vehicle.

Most importantly, the program would categorize crime patterns quickly and efficiently so that officers could better identify trends, Lowenberg said.

As an example, Lowenberg cited a so-called “envelope bandit” who was arrested recently after committing about 20 similar robberies in Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach and Newport Beach. The robber typically preyed on dry-cleaning stores run by a female worker, handing her a manila envelope to be filled with cash.

After piecing together the trend, police officers eventually tracked down the suspect. But if the proposed system had been in place, “we would have gotten this information to the network a lot sooner, and we might have gotten him sooner,” Lowenberg said. “Instead of getting away with 20 robberies, we might have gotten him after five or 10.”

Statistics show that habitual criminals account for a vast proportion of crimes committed, Lowenberg added.

The seven cities are scheduled to formally apply for the grant within a month. If the funding is approved, the program would get under way next summer.