This week marks a big shift in how the Kansas City Missouri
Police Department analyzes, responds to and prevents crime. October 3 will be
the implementation of Phase II of our Law Enforcement Resource Center. (To get
a background on the Law Enforcement Resource Center [LERC], check out this
article in our Informant newsletter.)
For years we have been reacting to crime. The LERC takes us
from reacting to interrupting crime. That is where we are now, primarily in
relation to property crimes. The next goal is to forecast crime.
Phase I of the LERC was
completed in March of this year. That introduced the Real Time Crime Center and
Crime Analysis Center. As soon as staffing becomes available, the Real Time
Crime Center will become a 24/7/365 operation. Right now, it is staffed from 10
a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The jobs of the detectives in this center are
to keep an eye on calls officers on the street are responding to and provide as
much information as they can about the people and locations officers are
encountering. They also will take intelligence that patrol officers gather from
their relationships with community members and see how it relates to unsolved
crimes or crimes being planned. Because of the Real Time Crime Center, officers
and detectives don’t have to spend nearly the time at their car computers or
desks looking up information. The Center will do that for them. The goal to get
that information back to officers and detectives is less than two minutes. The
officers and detectives, then, can be out working the streets, which is where
they have the most impact.
The Crime Analysis Center brought together the analysts from
our six patrol divisions into one central location for the first time in
memory. We have given them training and technology to track property crime
patterns across the metropolitan area. This has led to major breakthroughs that
would not have been possible before. We are catching the bad guys and stopping
them from committing more crimes. This does not just affect property crimes.
Many criminals are involved in both property and violent crimes.
Now Phase II is coming. This will bring an administrative
unit and the Perpetrator Information Center together. As LERC commander Major
Mike Corwin likes to say, the crime analysts are the “what.” The Perpetrator
Information Center is the “who” and “why.” They gather intelligence on violent
criminals to link them to the crimes they’ve committed and each other. Their
input into our crime analysis software development is invaluable.
Having all of these resources under one roof is
unprecedented, here and across the nation. We are leading the country in
developing proprietary intelligence software that harvests data from multiple
law enforcement sources, analyzes it and gets it back out to those who need it
at a rapid rate. We are breaking down the silos of information that used to
exist, and Kansas City will be safer for it.
Send comments to kcpdchiefblog@kcpd.org.
