The law enforcement community faces many unique and pressing challenges, including some of the most critical issues that we will address below. Making a significant dent in any of these areas would go a long way in improving officer safety, morale and community trust. How does your agency fare when it comes to addressing these common challenges?
Dealing with the opioid crisis head-on
Over 45 thousand Americans lost their lives to opioid abuse in 2017. That’s an average of 130 Americans per day, and this number continues to climb. Law enforcement officials find themselves on the front lines of the opioid epidemic, and investigating drug-related crime almost always exceeds the boundaries of an individual use, possession or distribution charge.
One of the major hurdles of existing law enforcement technology solutions is an effective search capability, which can make finding relevant information across multiple systems and compiling it into a single location a challenge. Not to mention waiting for return phone calls, emails and faxes from other jurisdictions. Officers and investigators need to be able to take the information they have — which might be a single suspect or piece of evidence — and quickly create associations from there.
With a simple and intuitive search engine, an officer or investigator can begin with a specific suspect or arrestee and work inductively outward, in order to expand the aperture of the investigation and build a broader case. When very little is known about suspects or related entities, powerful search engines can isolate facets of data by a variety of criteria — including demographic, vehicle descriptors, M.O., temporal and geospatial — which can further highlight potential focal points in the investigation with a few clicks of the mouse.
Learn more about the powerful search engine in Forensic Logic Leap Search.
Lowering violent crime rates
Gang-related crime and active shooter situations continue to plague our communities. While extremely useful, the tools that currently exist to help combat violent gun crime do not go far enough to assist law enforcement in generating actionable insights. These tools have not reached their full potential due to missing recovery information at the time of gun trace submission, erroneous data in the submissions, delayed lead generation and a lack of comprehensive use.
Analysts and investigators need to be able to quickly search for relevant information across all of their agency’s existing systems — as well as cross-jurisdictionally, since criminals operate with little regard to city, county and state lines. Once they have the ability to mine a treasure trove of data with ease, they need a tool powerful enough to automatically identify any associations between that data.
By integrating your existing point solutions (e.g., gunshot location, gun tracing, ballistics association and more) into a central analytics platform to enable intelligence-led policing, you can start to combat violent crime more effectively. Add on a simple search platform, and investigators can automatically find associations between people, locations, vehicles, telephone numbers, firearms and more.
Learn how Forensic Logic can help your agency combat violent crime.
Reducing your police footprint by using limited resources more efficiently
Reducing your police footprint while simultaneously reducing crime may sound counterintuitive, but the ability to do it successfully can better prioritize limited resources while significantly reducing crime rates and improving trust within the community. The law enforcement community in Oakland, California, one of America’s historically most dangerous cities, was able to do just that.
Many predictive and analytical tools simply point out where to place more officers on patrol based on high-crime neighborhoods. With limited staff, the Oakland Police Department — one of the most understaffed police agencies in America — partnered with Forensic Logic to reduce crime while also reducing their policing footprint.
By letting data drive every aspect of its approach to violent crime reduction, Oakland PD was able to precisely target its worst offenders and make investigative inroads at crime scenes. Traditionally, departments will perform lots of well-intentioned traffic stops in the hopes of finding a firearm; however, the yield rates have proven unsuccessful. With Forensic Logic, Oakland was able to use information and investigate leads at every level of the organization. Over the span of five years, Oakland reduced shootings by 50 percent, homicides by 42 percent and robberies by 38 percent.
Learn how Oakland PD was able to significantly reduce its police footprint and crime at the same time.
Recruiting and retaining top talent
Agencies have long struggled with not having enough resources to effectively police an entire community. A healthy economy and low unemployment actually contributed to a recruitment crisis in law enforcement this past year, leaving more work for fewer people. Increasingly common civil unrest and catastrophic weather events, along with the coming global recession, will make it even more difficult to adequately serve communities, maintain trust and keep personnel.
The deployment of a data-sharing, search and analytics platform makes it easier for everyone from patrol, analysts, investigators and command staff to quickly access the right information in every situation. This efficiency empowers them to do their job more effectively and more safely, both of which will naturally help recruitment and retention efforts.
In addition, the ability to track and share data and crime trends helps create accountability and a culture of trust, both within the department and in your community. Just ask Oakland PD, which has been praised by community leaders, law enforcement and the media for its success in reducing violent crime and recidivism by focusing its efforts on the city’s most violent offenders.
Learn how crime analytics software helps agencies improve decision-making and situational awareness.
Harness the Power of Search and Analytics
Forensic Logic has spent more than a decade collaborating with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to deploy the largest, most powerful network of users, information and technology in American law enforcement.
We’ve combined our industry-leading search engine, LEAP, with COPLINK’s advanced analytics and reporting to offer a full suite of information technology in a single platform. The finest tools and the richest data are now matched with streamlined integrations and rapid deployment.
“Mobile access to COPLINK enables an individual officer to do the work that once would have taken two or three people: the dispatcher, an analyst and perhaps even a detective to obtain the information in the field.”
—Sergeant, US County Sheriff’s Office
