Software joins cops on the beat.
COPLINK®: Program links databases,
speeds police investigations.

11/23/03
by Tatabonine Brant

Six police departments and two other law enforcement agencies in Alaska are about to get a powerful new investigator on staff, one that can talk to other jurisdictions and generate leads, all in minutes.

Its name is COPLINK®. The software program's specialty is reaching out to disparate law enforcement databases statewide and allowing them to interact.

"It's going to help us solve crimes a whole lot faster than we did before," said Seward Police Chief Thomas Clemons, who was instrumental in bringing COPLINK® to Alaska as president of the Alaska Association of Chiefs of Police.

Detectives from Barrow to Juneau already share information, but it can take hours or days to run down a single lead over the phone, sometimes only to find out it's a dead end.

COPLINK® will allow investigators to sift through thousands of law enforcement records around the state with just a few keystrokes, saving valuable time, the software's owner says.

COPLINK® is designed on the notion that most crimes are committed by people who already appear in police records, said Bob Griffin, chief executive officer of Knowledge Computing Corp., which produces the software. With COPLINK®, detectives are able to search that data to come up with leads they might not otherwise have known about, or at least not as quickly, he said.

Detectives can enter small shreds of information gathered from witnesses -- general suspect descriptions, tattoos, nicknames, a letter on a license plate -- into COPLINK®, which will then sift through police records, traffic tickets, 911 calls and other law enforcement files and generate a list of potential suspects.

The police chiefs association is "really zinged" about COPLINK®, said Anchorage Police Chief Walt Monegan, whose department is getting the new software, along with Alaska State Troopers, the Anchorage-based National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center Northwest, and police departments in Homer, Seward, Soldotna, Juneau and Kenai. Company officials hope to have the software installed by the end of the year. They say it will take a detective about eight hours to learn to use the system.

Bob Fund, COPLINK® program director, recently demonstrated the software. The data mined was from the Tucson Police Department, one of the first to get the software. The names in the demonstration were not real, but the scenario was based on a real Tucson child molestation case in which detectives used COPLINK® to help find the suspect, Fund said.

In the demonstration case, two men in a two-door red sedan snatch an 8-year-old girl. Two young children witness the crime but can provide detectives only with a general description of the suspects and the car. The kids tell police one of the men called himself "Waydoe."

"This is the kind of case that every cop dreads," said Fund, a former Tucson police lieutenant. "It's an abduction and possible homicide. You have to move quickly."

About 20 seconds after the information from the hypothetical witnesses is entered into COPLINK®, hundreds of potential leads pop up on the screen. One of them -- for a white 1992 Chevrolet pickup -- looks particularly promising because COPLINK® says it is related in some way to each of the suspect descriptions and to the description of the red car used in the abduction.

With a click on the link, the program shows that the white pickup was once hit by a man in a red two-door sedan who fled the scene. The suspected driver of the red car was a man named Nelson Lipo.

A click on the link for Lipo's name shows that he sometimes uses the alias "Waydo." Another link shows he has a long criminal history, including being a suspect in a 1993 child molestation. Another link reveals the names of two men Lipo has in the past been arrested with, both of whom match the description from the abduction.

Police now have three bona fide leads to follow, Fund said. The search took about 20 minutes.

In the real Tucson child molestation case the demo was based on, detectives were able to track down the suspect because of leads generated by COPLINK®, Fund said. The victim subsequently identified his abuser in a mug shot lineup and a warrant was issued for the man's arrest, Fund said.

The original prototype for COPLINK® was designed by researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Arizona through a grant by the National Institute of Justice. Knowledge Computing Corp. designed the commercialized version.

Law enforcement agencies in about 30 places around the country are expected to be using the software by the end of the year, company officials said. COPLINK® is already used in Boston and Tucson, among other places.

Tucson police say COPLINK® allows them to investigate in one hour what used to take close to 14, according to a report released this year by the city of Tucson.

COPLINK® is being installed in Alaska as a three-year pilot program. It's being paid for through a $52,000 federal grant administered by the state, with the other $242,500 coming from the Anchorage-based National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center Northwest, a program of the U.S. Department of Justice.

"The neat part about it is we can take it for a test drive," Monegan said. "If it's too cumbersome or too much money, we can let it die a quiet death. It sounds promising."

New funding sources will need to be found when the pilot program ends, officials said, which may include assessing fees to member agencies. Bob Griffiths, director of the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center Northwest, estimated it would cost between $100,000 and $150,000 annually to keep COPLINK® running after the pilot program ends.

"Our hope is that additional agencies will see the benefit and want to join," Griffiths said.

The only records that will be searchable by COPLINK® are the ones that law enforcement officials already have access to, Griffiths said. He added that it would be nice to eventually incorporate court and motor vehicle records into the system, but at this point there is no such plan.

Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works to promote democratic values and constitutional liberties in the digital age, said he is familiar with COPLINK®.

"As a tool, it's a good idea," he said, adding that if law enforcement agencies weren't developing new technologies, "we'd be concerned."

On the other hand, he said, there's always a concern that powerful databases could be used for fishing expeditions. What's to prevent officers from "just looking up their boyfriends and girlfriends," Schwartz said. Police departments should have policies in place to protect the public from such abuses, he said.

"The larger picture here is that there is a concern, as technologies become better and better, that police will rely on them too heavily," Schwartz said. COPLINK® is not designed to replace old-fashioned police work, he said. But in 10 to 15 years, when such software is common, he said, you don't want officers to forget the value of knocking on doors.

Company officials say COPLINK® is strictly for law enforcement purposes. In Alaska, only employees who have been subject to a background check will have access to the program, they said.

The Anchorage Police Department has a strict policy prohibiting the use of police information for personal gain or reasons, said Deputy Police Chief Audie Holloway. "I think we have fired people in the past over it," he said.