Wanted Postings: Suspects Now Getting Stuck on Web

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 Los Angeles Police Department and half a dozen Orange County law enforcement agencies are either already online or preparing to plug in.

One of those agencies, the Irvine Police Department, says its 6-month-old Internet effort may already have paid off. Irvine detectives say 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,” 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 locale. 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, U.S. Customs, the Postal Inspection Service and the FBI. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is developing a Web site that should be available in the next month.

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

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has even arrived in a limited fashion at the Los Angeles Police Department, a vast agency wrestling with issues of outdated technology and equipment in budget-strapped times.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 bureau 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,” LAPD spokeswoman Lori Taylor said. “It’s going to be awhile.”

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.

“Time will tell the tale of what the actual value is, but the potential here is just incredible,” said Lt. Ron Wilkerson of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. “We can provide people with a very clear thumbnail of all our homicide suspects, and by clicking on those they can get more information about the person and the crime, a larger picture--they can even print the picture out.”

More than 100,000 computer users have ducked into the Web site of the Irvine police, 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, the words “In Custody” flash.

“Yeah, I thought the bars were a real nice touch,” Povey said, with a chuckle. “People love to see the graphics though, that’s what catches people’s eye. We may add sound too, sometime down the road.”

The graphics often are the standard by which the sites are judged by visitors and, officials concede, by friendly competitors at different agencies. Huntington Beach police officials say they expect to be online in a matter of weeks with a site that includes a helicopter flying across the screen, while the special effects and lay-out planned for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department site remain top-secret.

“We don’t want someone else to use our idea before we do,” Wilkerson said. “Let’s just say it will be unique.”

The competition does have 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, join neighborhood watch groups or relate community concerns.

Police officials also point out the cost benefits of creating a Web home page, which is basically a collection of words and pictures that’s 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.

A recent Web search turned up wanted posters 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 electronic links to one another so a viewer can leap from one to the next.

Fountain Valley Police Lt. Bob Mosley said his agency will join that long list next month. Besides tracking down criminals, Mosley said, the Web site will open up a dialogue between police and residents who may be reluctant to phone in but do not think twice about trading electronic mail.

“Maybe they feel shy about calling in to ask a question or tell us something, but they seem more than willing to visit through the computer,” Mosley said. “And that can only be a good thing for us.”

In the future, when police have more sophisticated computers in patrol cars, officers will be able to download information on specific problem areas or new programs, making the Web sites more timely, Mosley said. “There are so many possibilities tied up in this thing,” he said.

One online clearinghouse, “Crime Files,” is a public service run by a San Diego company called ImageWare Software Inc. More than 7,200 people have ventured into the site since December to scan the fugitive information provided by about a dozen agencies, most in California.

New fugitives are listed weekly, and the next edition will include a child molestation suspect wanted by Huntington Beach police. ImageWare official Bob Ibbetson said so far, though, the site has not led to any arrests. 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 number one avenue used to get this type of information to the public, the main way police distribute and collect information.”

That may be a fortunate thing, according to Povey. Wanted posters may otherwise end up homeless in the 1990s, an era with electronic mail and postage stamps sold through ATM machines. “These days, how many people go to post offices anymore?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Wanted Online

More and more law enforcement agencies and online clearinghouses are posting fugitive information on the Internet in hopes of tracking down suspects. Here are Internet addresses for some of those online sites:

Irvine police: https://www.irvinepd.org

Tustin police: https://www.tustinpd.org

Los Angeles Police, West Valley Area: https://www.instanet.com/lapd/suspects

U.S. Marshals, Central District of California: https://www.MostWanted.com/USMarshals/LosAngeles

FBI: https://www.fbi.gov

U.S Customs: https://www.gate.net/~customs/custwant

Cop Net: https://police.sas.ab.ca

Crime Files: https://www.emeraldcity.com/crimefiles

World’s Most Wanted: https://www.MostWanted.com

Source: World Wide Web

Researched by GEOFF BOUCHER / Los Angeles Times