Case Study: Erlanger Kentucky Police Department Captures Critical Data to Fight Crime

Information Management Special Reports, August 26, 2008

Marc Fields, Steve Castor

Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is foremost in the minds of managers in any business. Organizations that are the most successful at collecting, evaluating and applying information are consistently the leaders in their respective industries. This same logic applies to police work, where the ability to act quickly and decisively can enable officers to solve crimes, apprehend criminals and protect citizens.

Finding, formatting and delivering insightful information is the key. This was our overriding premise at the Erlanger Kentucky Police Department, where we have created an operational business intelligence (BI) system with integrated search capabilities and links to local law enforcement applications. The new information system combines current crime data from 19 government agencies to link formerly unrelated information about suspects, incidents, arrests and crimes. It provides our police force with a real-time view of incidents, arrests, 911 calls and other events throughout the dispatch area.

At the heart of this new information system is a software platform from Information Builders called WebFOCUS Magnify. Magnify combines BI and search technology to enable officers to locate and share data, which was formerly kept in paper files and not shared beyond city boundaries. The software generates real-time search results to police officers in the field, in conjunction with key performance indicators (KPIs) for supervisors at headquarters.

Officers connect to the system through cellular-powered displays in their vehicles. Entering a brief search string returns header information followed by a narrative about specific incidents in the order those incidents occurred. Drilling down, officers can obtain reports that list all the pertinent information about each incident. For example, if an officer stops a speeding car and performs a quick search of the license plate number, the software could display a police report from earlier in the day in a neighboring city involving a hit-and-run incident, even if the witness at the scene got only part of the license plate number. In this way, a suspect in two crimes could be apprehended through a small piece of shared data.

Forging Connections among Agencies

The primary motivator for this project was a desire to share information among multiple agencies. Historically, the Erlanger Police Department used mapping and statistical data systems developed in-house to provide information to patrol officers and supervisors. Neighboring cities were using other systems, and lots of police records were stored in filing cabinets.

Thus, while criminals crossed back and forth over city boundaries, the information about their crimes stayed within the individual cities, often out of reach when it was needed most. The department needed a tool that could dig into historical databases and integrate real-time information about crimes, arrests and incidents. That’s what Erlanger’s BI and search technology tools do for the department.

The Erlanger Police Department first learned about Information Builders’ WebFOCUS BI environment through the Northern Kentucky Area Planning Commission. The department went on to implement an information system that merges data from 10 neighboring cities and 19 government agencies. The system enables officers to search crime records and incident reports stretching back over five years. By leveraging this up-to-date repository of information, officers can respond to calls with more knowledge in hand, and supervisors can deploy the force in a way that best serves the community.

The police department was also motivated by a recent upswing in crime following several years of declines that is stretching police resources to the limit. If the department can work smarter and do more work with fewer people, they can avoid raising taxes or hiring additional personnel. This realization drove us to build the new information system.

The Convergence of Search and BI

Search tools, for the most part, index and query unstructured data, taking a broad approach to finding data and delivering multiple possible results rather than exact answers. But the marriage of search technology and BI tools brings together two technologies dedicated to the discovery and analysis of data, each tending to look at different types of information with radically different approaches to finding that information.

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