Low-Tech Policing Was Cunanan’s Accomplice

If the Miami Beach Police Department had computer technology as sophisticated as that used in one of the town’s trendy restaurants, fashion designer Gianni Versace would probably still be alive.

Andrew Cunanan, believed to have killed Versace, should have been captured the week before when a pawnbroker routinely passed along information Cunanan gave--his name, hotel address and a fingerprint--to local police. Cunanan was on the FBI’s most wanted list for four other murders.

After evading embarrassing media questions for a week, the Miami Beach police lamely explained that pawnbroker information forms required by law sit in a box until a police clerk enters them into the computer system.

In fairness to the Miami Beach cops, the same fatal lapse would have occurred in almost every police department in the country.

The FBI shares some of the blame. The bureau long ago should have helped local police to better automate systems designed to identify people on the wanted list. After all, it is the FBI’s list, highly glamorized by J. Edgar Hoover and his successors as one of the bureau’s crime-fighting hallmarks.

In an age when credit card purchases are checked in an instant by national computer systems and where waiters routinely transmit dinner orders by computer to the chef in the kitchen, law enforcement still lags in technology. There are several reasons for this. Computerization and technological advances came late to policing and are still primitive in comparison to private industries, which recognize that failure to be as advanced as competitors can put them out of business.

The absence of bottom-line pressures, civil service tenure and serving under elected officials who respond to political concerns have impeded technological research by the police. Police leaders, like their elected superiors, almost always lack business experience. This, combined with widespread public fear of automation, the public’s mistrust of authority and a general hesitation to allow law enforcement agencies to build “secret” data systems, combine to chill technological advancement in law enforcement.

The police culture itself works to impede progress. The mystique of detectives solving cases by interviewing suspects and having brilliant flashes of intuition a la “NYPD Blue” makes police agencies slow to seek budget allotments for technology, preferring instead to seek money to add more officers. It is sexier for politicians to announce the hiring of additional cops than to champion computerized police information systems.

Police leaders are generally content to have 911 systems that allow for speedy dispatch of police vehicles. Yet it is relatively inexpensive to equip patrol officers, pawnbrokers and gun dealers with scanners that can check information against a database, similar to the technology used by supermarket cashiers. There is no reason to rely on written forms. The data should go online and instantly identify a wanted person just as easily as a merchant is informed of an overdrawn credit card.

Instead of insisting that American communication companies build in keys that would permit future eavesdropping (wire taps have tripled during the Clinton administration and 90% involve nonviolent crimes), the FBI should be suggesting data banks that would enable local cops to immediately identify the child molesters, rapists, armed robbers and killers who pose a real danger to the public.

Sadly, the current political and law enforcement leadership is driven more by “get tough” rhetoric than by research and technology.