Wanted Posters Come to Cyberspace

Once they hung on the walls of frontier post offices, dogeared handbills with murky pictures or rough sketches of fugitives and felons. But now, in the age of modems, the wanted poster has found a new high-tech home: the Internet.

In Sacramento, state lawmakers are considering a bill to post electronic mug shots of California’s most wanted in cyberspace, while the LAPD and other Southern California law enforcement agencies are either online or preparing to take the plunge. In Irvine, police say their 6-month-old Internet effort may already have paid off: An image of murder suspect Ramon Patterson that was posted on the World Wide Web may have played a part in the fugitive’s arrest last week in Burien, Wash.

“We can’t say for sure it had an impact, but we’d like to think that it was a factor and that it helped draw attention to our search for this suspect,” Irvine Sgt. Phil Povey said. “We believe there is a lot of potential here. It’s very interesting, a new way of doing business.”

It’s a business the California Department of Justice may be entering shortly. A bill introduced this month by state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine) would put the wanted posters of as many as 1,500 violent crime suspects online, grouped by name, crime and geography. With some studies showing that 16% of the U.S. population has Internet access, the effort could tap into a vast pool of potential tipsters, Susan R. Swatt, a Johnson aide, said Thursday.

Already, computer users can scan federal mug shots and information offered online by the U.S. Marshals Service, Customs Service, the Postal Inspection Service and the FBI. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is developing a website that should be available in the next month.

A recent Web search showed that wanted posters were available at sites created by police in nearly every state, assorted Crime Stoppers programs, and the syndicated television show “Unsolved Mysteries.” Many agencies have sites listed in clearinghouses such as “Cop Net,” --which boasts of having 174,963 online visitors in January--and have links to one another so a viewer can leap from one to the next.

In Orange County, the Sheriff’s Department, along with police in Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach and the city of Orange all plan to debut home pages on the Web in coming weeks, and each will include photos of wanted suspects. Tustin police have online offerings, including their own rogues’ gallery, and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is reviewing the concept.

Oxnard police established a home page in December offering Neighborhood Watch handbooks and information about different units in the department, but so far lacks the resources to include wanted posters.

The Internet has even arrived in a limited fashion at the Los Angeles Police Department, a vast agency wrestling with issues of outdated technology and equipment in budget-strapped times. Detectives in the West Valley office have posted local suspect information on their own Web page, but the rest of the department is far from joining the information revolution.

“We’re just getting computers in the offices for the first time,” said LAPD spokeswoman Lori Taylor. “It’s going to be a while.”

Officials at several agencies lauded the online medium’s capability to bring clear, color photos of fugitives into the homes of citizens who, with the click of a mouse, can instantly respond to police with tips and other information.

“The potential here is just incredible,” said Lt. Ron Wilkerson of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.

The website of the Irvine police has had more than 100,000 hits, where they are greeted by the agency’s gleaming silver badge and the city seal. “And it’s truly worldwide, too,” Povey said. “We got more than 400 hits from Sweden, for some reason.”

Click on a neighborhood shown on the city map, and you get crime statistics for that area. Select the heading “The Chief’s Office,” and you get the smiling face of the city’s top cop, Charles S. Brobeck, along with a description of the department’s services. Or, if you click on “Most Wanted,” you can get an image of Patterson’s face behind the bars of a faux jail cell. Above his head flash the words, “In Custody.”

“Yeah, I thought the bars were a real nice touch,” Povey said, with a chuckle.

Competition among Web sites has a positive effect, Wilkerson said. The better sites get the most traffic, both by citizens and other cops. That means more people will be exposed to the agency’s information, be it wanted posters or information on how to report crimes.

Police officials also point out the cost benefits of creating a home page, which is basically a collection of words and pictures that is given an Internet address and can be viewed and downloaded by computer users. Far cheaper than mailers or printed brochures, the home page can be made for next to nothing with in-house computer technicians and a few community sponsors.

One online clearinghouse, “Crime Files,” is a public service run by a San Diego company called ImageWare Software. More than 7,200 hits have been registered on the site since December, with people scanning the fugitive information provided by about a dozen agencies, most in California.

New fugitives are listed weekly, ImageWare official Bob Ibbetson said. So far, the site has not lead to an arrest. Indeed, no one interviewed for this story could point to a specific case yet cracked solely by an online tipster.

“But if we can solve one crime in a year, then the whole effort would be worthwhile,” Ibbetson said. “In the future, when millions and millions more people use the Internet, I think it will be the No. 1 avenue used to get this type of information to the public, the main way police distribute and collect information.”