Colonel Jerry Lee, Chief of
Police, and Sergeant Mark Dougherty
St. Louis County (MO)
Police Department
It
is recognized that the ability to share relevant information regarding criminal
affairs in a timely manner is increasingly important. Within St. Louis County,
Missouri, there are 91 different municipalities, many of which have their own
police departments and investigative units. This number of investigative
agencies grows dramatically when the surrounding counties in the St. Louis
metropolitan region are taken into consideration. Criminals often operate across
jurisdictional boundaries and many crimes continue to remain unsolved because of
a lack of communication across those same jurisdictional boundaries.
Following the September 11th tragedy, there was a renewed emphasis in the St. Louis metropolitan area regarding the sharing of information and creating a data warehouse. The St. Louis Area Police Chiefs Association also endorsed the concept of sharing information, so that agencies could "connect the dots" and see the relationship between sets of information stored on various systems.
In response, the St. Louis County Police Department (SLCPD) began in August 2002, the in-house development of a data warehousing system. Named CrimeMATRIX, it utilized law enforcement data maintained on St. Louis County systems to find relationships among persons of interest. The intent was to develop a system that could be expanded to allow law enforcement agencies in the entire metropolitan area the opportunity to link their data. The resulting regional network of information would display criminal history data and identify relationships among persons of interest across jurisdictional boundaries.
The Details: Development
The first component of the CrimeMATRIX system, called LYNX, became operational in the third quarter of 2002. LYNX was designed using police report, gun permit, and mug shot data from the SLCPD and the various agencies that contract with them for its records management system.
In 2003, the Regional
Justice Information Service (REJIS) received $400,000 in federal funding to
develop or acquire a data warehouse application. REJIS was awarded the funding
as a joint City and County of St. Louis commission, authorized to provide
information technology services to law enforcement agencies throughout the St.
Louis Metropolitan Area. REJIS decided in the fall of 2003 that it would be a
better approach to further develop the already operational CrimeMATRIX than to
purchase another similar system. The new developments included enhanced tools
and easy to use web-based interfaces to extract information from the CrimeMATRIX,
as well as the ability to interface with other local, county, state, and federal
law enforcement systems such as NCIC (the National Crime Information Center),
MULES (the Missouri Uniform Law Enforcement System), and DOR (the Department of
Revenue). Because many different law enforcement agencies in the region contract
with REJIS for various
computer related services and with the SLCPD for a
records management system, cooperative agreements were established which
expanded the number of data sources from which the CrimeMATRIX was able to
extract information. It took the St. Louis County Police Department and REJIS
programmers approximately 3,500 man-hours to complete the CrimeMATRIX
application suite. As of June 2005, over 100 local, county, state, and federal
law enforcement agencies utilize CrimeMATRIX. [Figure 1]
Solutions
Before its original development, the SLCPD looked to existing commercially available software applications that could possibly integrate all the various data sources and deliver the type of product desired. While many of these other alternative products offered good linking features, they didn't provide the specific functionality for drilling through relationship entities to the underlying source documents. Furthermore, the purchase of these alternatives, as well as obtaining appropriate licensing agreements, would be cost prohibitive for a metropolitan solution.
By developing an in-house system using personnel with advanced degrees in mathematics and engineering, it had the ability to be custom tailored to the specific needs of the St. Louis metropolitan area agencies. It could successfully integrate the multiple types of data sources at a significantly reduced cost. The CrimeMATRIX is now provided free of charge to any agency on the REJIS network.
The CrimeMATRIX data repository is comprised of police report data (excluding the narrative portion) from 82 police departments. The repository also includes regional mug shots, sex offender registrations, gun permits, gang affiliations, traffic tickets, death certificates, probation and parole files, final court dispositions, and links to pawnshop transaction data from the systems of 82 local and county agencies.
The key to success is the CrimeMATRIX's ability to collect and maintain data from various law enforcement systems that reside on different database platforms. The way that each system stores data varies considerably. In most cases, these systems do not share a common data dictionary or data formatting convention. For example, telephone numbers can be stored as strings with hyphens (xxx-xxx-xxxx) or as integers (xxxxxxxxxx).
In addition, differing operating system
platforms, such as Unix®, IBM® mainframes, or Microsoft®
and different database products,
such as DB2®, Oracle®, MS
SQL®, and MS Access®, present their own difficulties.
CrimeMATRIX overcomes these system incompatibility issues by creating harvest
routines to collect, merge, geo-code, and standardize the various record
formats. Once a customized harvest routine is established, all data imports
occur automatically according to their predetermined schedule without the need
for human intervention. [Figure 2]
In the St. Louis Metropolitan Area, CrimeMATRIX harvests on a daily basis police report information from SLCPD’s records management system called CARE (Computer Assisted Report Entry) and from traffic ticket data. Mug shot and sex offender records are collected from a regional Image Resource and Imaging System (IRIS) on an hourly basis. Gang and gun permit data are harvested on a bi-weekly basis. Probation, parole, and death certificate information are collected from state systems on a monthly basis. In each of these systems, pedigree, address, vehicle, telephone numbers, and crime information are all extracted and imported into the centralized CrimeMATRIX data repository.
Strengths
A major strength of the CrimeMATRIX is its
ability to reveal hidden relationships between individuals. These associations
are exposed by means of matching common data elements in different records. For
example, an individual of interest in an investigation may share the same work
phone number of another individual of interest, and the CrimeMATRIX will quickly
identify this relationship. As persons of interest are added into the system
they are compared and consolidated into the existing database population
creating a meta-person record, which contains the latest pedigree information,
residential and employer address information, residential and employer phone
numbers, vehicle data, shared crime data, mug shot histories, and much more.
[Figure 3]
This meta-person record is used by CrimeMATRIX to build linking or relationship tables, which enable the system to quickly establish relationships between people, places and things, and process user requests for information. In case studies, the system saves an investigator approximately eight hours per suspect investigation. This is the average time it would take an investigator to query and link the same amount of data from other disparate law enforcement systems.
Componets
The
CrimeMATRIX's database structure is
designed to optimize rapid information
retrieval. Web-based applications were written to quickly extract and summarize
information for investigators. Currently, four applications have been written to
query and process data from the system:
- The first application is IRIS. It is a regional mug shot and sex offender system that processes over 110,000 arrests annually. This system is interfaced with the regional arrest system to eliminate the need for the redundant entry of booking information. [Figure 4]
-
The second application is called LYNX. This
application allows an investigator to identify and locate offenders based on
the common data elements of each person. LYNX can also identify how other
associates know one another, independent of the initial suspect. For example;
in the course of an investigation it is learned that suspect A knows both
suspect B and C through different crime
reports,
but what was not revealed is that suspects B and C also shared a third crime
report and work at the same company. Because LYNX can operate on a wireless
environment it can provide investigators with on-scene mug shot images, mug
shot line-ups, criminal history, address history, vehicle information,
probation and parole status, gun permit issuance data, and inter-relationship
analysis. [Figure 5]
- The third application is called Pawnshop Monitoring. This application captures people and property data relating to the pawning of merchandise. Through a separate database application, links are established on existing persons of interest in the CrimeMATRIX to create a more comprehensive view of the person. Property that is pawned is then compared to stolen police report property records. [Figure 6]
-
The fourth application is called MapMATRIX.
This web-based application allows the investigator to map sex offenders,
probation and parole offenders, wanted
persons, pawnshop transactions, and
crimes in a multi-jurisdictional environment on a mobile laptop. The
application allows an investigator to select a person of interest on the map
and display all crimes, addresses, mug shots, and associated linking data
related to the individual. Because criminals focus on opportunities instead of
jurisdictional boundaries, MapMATRIX allows an investigator to look inside
neighboring jurisdictions for similar types of crimes. [Figure 7]
Accessibility
Access to the CrimeMATRIX system is restricted to only law enforcement personnel and operates on a dedicated regional law enforcement network maintained by REJIS. There is no charge to access the system as long as the user is a REJIS network subscriber.
Between January 1 and June 30, 2005, over 4.5 million inquires were made to the CrimeMATRIX system. As of June 2005, over 100 local, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies (including FBI, DEA, ATF, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office) either contribute and/or benefit from the use of the CrimeMATRIX System. Currently the System contains the following record sets:
Vehicles 408,000
Telephone Numbers 581,000
Traffic Tickets 193,000
Pawnshop Transactions 98,000
Persons of Interest* 1,292,000
Crimes 1,293,000
* Arrested subjects, registered sex offenders, police report suspects, probation and parole subjects, and gang members
Project Selection
The CrimeMATRIX method of networking and connecting data from different systems utilizes a centralized computer repository architecture. This means that the CrimeMATRIX harvests information from the various databases to which it has access at predetermined intervals and brings that information back to one central location.
An option considered was to have a decentralized system that queried each individual agency's databases or database index with each request. This approach was not chosen because of the increased time spent accessing each individual network. If any one network was down, then the resulting suspect composite would be incomplete, and there would be no quick way to establish connections between persons of interest. By consolidating data on a central repository server, interruptions have not been encountered and multiple queries to multiple databases aren't necessary. If one agency's servers are off-line, the information is still accessible to the network.
In developing the system there weren't any goals based upon benchmarks made by other agencies, but there were internal goals established. The St. Louis County Police Department and REJIS wanted other agencies to use the system and therefore wanted it to be efficient, fast, and easy to use. Efficiency was accomplished by creating a system that worked on the same computer backbone as other systems that already had a functioning help desk, that already had functioning security measures, and that utilized the same login accounts and passwords as established systems.
The CrimeMATRIX proved its speed when tested queries returned in under 30 seconds and mug shot images of persons could be sent to the wireless computers in patrol cars within 10 seconds. The CrimeMATRIX is also easy to use because the interfaces are all web-based applications with which the users are familiar.
Analysis Techniques
The version of the CrimeMATRIX that is in use today didn't evolve in a traditional sense, but it is not the same version of the CrimeMATRIX that was originally envisioned. The changes came about, as additional data sources were made available to the CrimeMATRIX Project Team. These additional data sources came from the State of Missouri as probation/parole, death certificate, and gang affiliation files. In particular, the Missouri State Department of Corrections saw how useful the system was for their fugitive detectives to apprehend parole violators and offered the probation/parole files to the system.
The St. Louis County Police Department and REJIS decided to track the progress of the CrimeMATRIX by establishing a simple web log transaction database that keeps a running count of CrimeMATRIX inquiries. This system allows for a quick method of determining how much the system is being used. The usage of charts and graphs didn't help the developers keep the project in focus as much as receiving feedback from the many agencies that started to see crime fighting success stories based on the use of the CrimeMATRIX.
Results
The current version of the CrimeMATRIX has achieved everything its developers had envisioned. Isolated data sources have now been joined together and information is being shared across jurisdictional lines and as a result, criminals that have eluded law enforcement officers in the past are now being successfully prosecuted. Future enhancements are anticipated as user needs dictate.
Besides the creation of an environment where information is shared, there were two specific positive side effects. The first is that the centralized CrimeMATRIX system will continue to operate and deliver results, even if one or more of the data source contributors goes off-line. A second benefit was that five agencies that were reluctant to switch from their own records keeping system began using the St. Louis County CARE system as a records management solution, thereby increasing the amount of police report data being shared.
The CrimeMATRIX system has been a tremendous success story for law enforcement in the St. Louis area. It has proven its worth by being a key ingredient in solving homicides, armed robberies, larcenies, burglaries, and recovering stolen property. Having a system that allows over 100 agencies to share a diverse collection of criminal justice information is an anomaly in America. The browser-based application runs on both desktop computers and on mobile computers in patrol cars. Because the application provides both detailed and summary data, it has broad appeal for administrative, investigative, and tactical use.
Institutionalization
The CrimeMATRIX is highly adaptable to many computerized agencies across the country and is available for implementation in other metropolitan areas through a contract agreement with REJIS. The routines, which access each agency's data systems and extract relevant information, can be customized to each agency's needs. The CrimeMATRIX has been showcased at the 2003 and 2004 Department of Justice Crime Mapping Conference in Denver, CO and Boston, MA; the 2005 International Association of Chiefs of Police Law Enforcement Information Management Conference in Greensboro, NC; and the 2003 and 2005 University of Georgia Improving Crime Data Conferences in Atlanta, GA.
One key lesson learned throughout the development of the CrimeMATRIX is the necessity for a solution to integrate with other existing systems. The St. Louis County Police Department is rewriting its’ records management system to be NIBRS (National Incident Base Reporting) compliant. As the Department works toward improving existing applications and integrating additional sources, the open architecture of the CrimeMATRIX Data Warehouse system will allow for these changes with minor database engineering changes.
For further information, contact Sergeant Mark Dougherty, St. Louis County Police Department, 7900 Forsyth Blvd., Clayton, MO 63105, voice line (314) 615-7826, or email: mdougherty@stlouisco.com.
Colonel Jerry Lee, Chief of
Police
A 34-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department, Chief Lee was appointed to his position June 1, 2004. He is responsible for the overall operation of the almost 1,000 member department, which serves a population of over one million citizens. Chief Lee holds a Bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice from St. Louis University and attended the 140th session of the FBI National Academy, the U.S. Secret Service Dignitary Protection Seminar, the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Drug Commanders School, and the 44th session of the Law Enforcement Executive Development Seminar. He is also a CALEA Assessor Team Leader. The St. Louis County Police Department has been CALEA Accredited since November 1998.
Sergeant Mark Dougherty
Sergeant Mark Dougherty is a 25-year veteran of the St. Louis County Police Department, and is currently the Supervisor of the Computer Services Bureau. He has a Bachelor’s degree in History from St. Louis University and a Master’s Degree in Computer Resource and Information Management from Webster University.
