Computers Help Police Take a Megabyte Out of Crime

Hunched over a computer in the belly of the Oxnard police station, Jane Le Mond crunches numbers and sorts through data in a cramped office that is permeated with the smell of coffee brewing 24 hours a day.

Fielding queries from cops on the beat and detectives with riddles for cases, Le Mond sorts through the tea leaves that are police databases and helps find answers--a heavy cluster of car thefts during the early morning hours along Oxnard Boulevard, home break-ins with uncanny similarities, a short list of known thieves with a certain kind of tattoo on their necks.

Le Mond’s seemingly mundane job is actually part of the forefront of police work.

Her work not only helps detectives with major cases, it also helps officers on patrol.

Increasingly in Ventura County, law enforcement agencies are turning to crime analysts with computer expertise and advanced training, like Le Mond, for answers.

But local crime analysts want to take the modernization a step forward, coordinating data from agency to agency and eventually setting up countywide databases to track crime.

Next week, crime analysts from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department as well as the Oxnard, Ventura, Port Hueneme and Simi Valley police departments will meet for the first time to coordinate their work.

Instead of spending weeks going through file cards or hours pushing pins into maps, analysts can obtain information in seconds with a click of the keyboard.

With speed and accuracy, new computer databases and mapping software--with names like “InfoCop” and “CopView”--can pinpoint where and when crimes have occurred.

The data can also be manipulated to shake out information that shows specific crime patterns. Computers can link a criminal to his or her criminal behavior--all the burglaries in which the perpetrator used a “doggy door” to gain entrance to a home, for instance, or all the “hot-prowl” burglaries in which the perpetrator breaks in when someone is home.

Essentially, it is work that has always been done by detectives and police officers--but by hand. The difference now is technology.

Crime analysis units were started by many departments nearly 20 years ago.

Instead of having to search through thousands of index cards or push pins into maps to review every crime in a given area, analysts can retrieve information and manipulate it with the click of a computer mouse. And the information is current, as police reports are now entered into computers within 24 hours.

By using statistical analysis of past incidents, agencies can even predict the probability of certain types of crimes occurring at certain times of the day in a certain place.

Thieves involved in a spate of “smash burglaries” in Thousand Oaks--during which windows were broken and valuables snatched--were nabbed with the help of Sheriff’s Department crime analyst Dana Trottier. Noting what kinds of businesses were hit, when they were robbed and where, she was able to make suggestions about deploying the surveillance teams that eventually busted the thieves.

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With computers, this kind of crime forecast can be provided to officers daily.

The potential is immense, yet agencies in Ventura County still have a long way to go to tap into the full potential of computers, officials said.

Departments already have access to several statewide and federal databases that track parolees, sex offenders, drug offenders and gang members, but a countywide database to track local criminal activity is still a long way off, according to officials.

And although all departments maintain extensive computer databases, concerns about costs or the possibility of purchasing an inadequate system have caused some to simply wait before buying more sophisticated computers and software systems.

While every law enforcement agency in the county has computers and access to computer databases, some have watched as other California police agencies have set up more powerful computer mapping systems, computer reporting systems and databases to analyze criminal activity.

In San Diego, residents can tap into the Police Department’s Internet site and learn how many people were assaulted in their neighborhood, or how many cars were stolen or homes burglarized.

On the forefront of computer mapping technology and using computer databases to monitor criminal activity, the San Diego department’s Crime Analysis Unit has long provided such information to officers, but starting late last year it offered the information to the public.

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In the late 1970s, law enforcement agencies in all of San Diego County set up a countywide crime database that includes arrest records, traffic accidents, crime reports and a list of stolen property compiled by that county’s 29 agencies.

As envisioned, officials hope the system will eventually include mug shots, even entire 2,000-page homicide case files and on-line field reports that could be downloaded by officers from laptop computers in their patrol cars. But an attempt last fall to update that database was halted because of cost.

The estimated cost of updating the system went from $5 million to $16 million. The escalating cost has been a lesson for officials in Ventura County about the potential pitfalls of computer technology.

Ventura County agencies said they will not make similar mistakes and are working to incorporate computer crime analysis into their day-to-day activities.

“I once worked in the San Diego Police Department and I have a great deal of faith that within the next few years we are going to catch up with them and take our place on the cutting edge,” Le Mond said.

Le Mond attends briefings with patrol officers and detectives twice a week. Every 21 days, she plots information about serious crimes and is constantly fielding requests by officers to search the department’s databases for information.

“What I want is an overall perspective of crime in my areas,” said Oxnard Police Cmdr. Joe Munoz, who heads the department’s investigative division. “You’re looking for clusters, time spans, and M.O. factors.”

Munoz goes through a long list of demands his investigators and patrol officers put on the crime analysts, asking for everything from 30-day trend reports, to information about parolees or probationers who have moved into a neighborhood.

Investigators also pay special attention to arrest statistics--who is getting arrested and for what. And a few concentrate on narcotics violations, because there is often a correlation between narcotics and other crimes.

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The Oxnard and Port Hueneme police departments are using part of a state grant that targets drunken driving to track drug- and alcohol-related crimes using a computer mapping system.

Senior Officer Ken Klopman, a beat commander for a neighborhood in northeast Oxnard who wrote the grant proposal, said the technology is a tremendous help.

“With the maps we can better gauge where patrols or checkpoints are needed,” Klopman said.

A lot of what is learned through computer mapping of crimes many officers in the field already knew. For instance, in Thousand Oaks the Sheriff’s Department once plotted all the auto thefts and found that they were concentrated along the Ventura Freeway corridor.

But sometimes the data can be surprising.

In Santa Barbara, the Police Department coded its crime reports to include whether the incident was drug- or alcohol-related.

They plotted the data on a map of Santa Barbara and then overlaid locations of bars and liquor stores, Klopman said. But the incidents were not clustered around liquor stores or bars. Instead, police found that they had a number of occurrences around what turned out to be backyard parties, he said.

In Ventura County, the Oxnard and Simi Valley police departments are probably the furthest along at incorporating computers into daily police work.

In Simi Valley, the department is working out the kinks in its computer mapping system, said crime analyst Debbie Ruud.

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Already the department’s extensive database has been updated to allow officers with little computer training to search it on their own.

“Instead of having to ask me for something, I see more and more officers jumping on the computer and doing their own searches, which means it is being used more,” Ruud said.

The Ventura Police Department expects to install by early September a computer mapping system that will plot the week-to-week shifts in crime, said Cpl. Jeanne Boger, the department’s crime analyst. “We have the software, but we just haven’t been able to set it up yet,” said Boger, one of the few analysts in the county who is also a sworn officer. And the Sheriff’s Department is working to establish a countywide system that can take advantage of its vast computer database on crime, which goes back to 1988.

Certain divisions within the Sheriff’s Department have already started that project.

For several years, the sheriff’s Thousand Oaks division has received the funding to allow it to generate computer maps of crime incidents.

Trottier, who worked for 10 years as a crime analyst in Thousand Oaks and is now assigned to Camarillo, said everything is in place to set up a countywide crime database and mapping system for the Sheriff’s Department, but it will cost money and take additional personnel to put it together.

“I know it will happen,” said Trottier, who helped solve the smash burglaries in Thousand Oaks. “I’m just not sure when.”

And the Sheriff’s Department plans to have a system in place by the end of the year to provide detailed booking information on-line for all departments.

But only a few departments in the county are now using databases and mapping technology to follow crime patterns.

Some crime analysts rely on the old methods of simply using pins punched into maps to look at crime patterns. And because the analysts see crime reports coming into their offices every day, occasionally they uncover patterns without the aid of computers.

“Sometimes it just clicks in your head,” Trottier said. “But the computer is an amazing tool. It’s quick. It’s manageable.”

When combined with mapping technology, the computer becomes an even more formidable tool, she said.

“Maps are great because a picture is worth a thousand words,” Trottier said.