Since that first recorded NCIC identification, the nation's law enforcement community has become heavily dependent on crime networks. Today, there are a plethora of local, state, regional and national systems supporting police efforts to identify and investigate crime. These computerized networks have steadily expanded their scope and capabilities over the years, growing from small databases containing records on stolen automobiles and wanted persons to massive warehouses of data holding tens of millions of records -- ranging from missing juveniles and foreign fugitives to violent gangs and terrorists.
Until recently, the crime records were simply alphanumeric information -- names, addresses, license numbers and serial numbers -- that was simple to store and search. Today, however, police are also beginning to use networks to search for images -- as in mug shots, fingerprints, and crime scene photos and diagrams. These databases and the networks that support them are just beginning to take shape. But by the year 2000, officers in patrol cars could be using pocket-sized cameras, fingerprint scanners and laptop computers equipped with wireless modems to send and receive images and data, speeding the identification process for criminal suspects.
What's not clear is which of the networks and systems will remain and which will merge or consolidate with others. Some networks exist today to combat a crime that may not be seen as important five or 10 years from now. Remember when everyone was worried about organized crime taking over the gas and oil business during the energy crisis? Limited federal funds also may force some separate networks to consolidate.
One thing is certain -- this country will never have the kind of highly centralized computer database for crime that other countries have developed. "It's not like other countries where you have a national police system enforcing national laws," said James Zepp, technical assistance director at the Justice Research and Statistics Association. "Our decentralized system here makes it difficult for that to happen. A given act may be a crime in one state and not a crime in another state."
The Federal Networks
A recent FBI survey found that in one year, NCIC helped law enforcement officers find 81,750 wanted persons, arrest 113,293 individuals, locate 39,268 missing juveniles and find 110,681 stolen cars valued at $570 million. NCIC has been used to track down some of America's most notorious criminals of the past 30 years, including Oklahoma bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh and James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Not surprisingly, NCIC has become a victim of its own success. In 1996, the system processed 600 million transactions using software designed in the 1960s. More importantly, crime has changed in the 30 years since NCIC's creation, and so has technology -- forcing the FBI to launch a major upgrade in the early 1990s to raise the network's level of efficiency.
The main thrust of NCIC modernization, known as NCIC 2000, is to offer law enforcement agencies more: electronic transmission of photographs, mug shots, stolen property and fingerprint data. Squad cars would be equipped with PCs, a hand-held fingerprint scanner, a hand-held digital camera and a small printer to send and receive these types of images.
Working with systems vendor Harris Corp., the FBI plans to provide custom software to run these new features, but police departments will have to obtain their own hardware. While the FBI hasn't mandated that all law enforcement agencies purchase the hardware needed to use every facet of NCIC 2000, it has required them to be able to send messages based on NCIC 2000 standards and use the FBI's newer transmission protocols within three years of implementation.
This requirement hasn't gone over very well with local law enforcement agencies, which will have to come up with the funds to purchase hardware that uses NCIC 2000 standards. "The FBI has been nailed hard for taking this top-down approach," said Zepp.
Meanwhile, NCIC 2000 was scheduled to be operational by the end of 1995. But implementation has been delayed by the addition of new system requirements as well as software development problems. The delays and changes have significantly increased the cost for NCIC 2000 -- from $73 million to $183.2 million. NCIC 2000 is now scheduled to be operational by July 1999.
Affordability is also an issue with the FBI's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS). The FBI describes IAFIS as representing "a quantum leap in communications, computing, and data storage and retrieval technologies." When finished in mid-1999, IAFIS will provide state and local law enforcement agencies with quick access to criminal history files through an automated fingerprint matching system. IAFIS consists of three major components:
The Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which will perform the fingerprint matches. It is expected to process 65,000 matches daily, using a database of 36 million prints, when in operation.
The Interstate Identification Index (III), which is a sophisticated pointer system that indexes the most current criminal records. The III will tell searchers which law enforcement agency in which state has information on an individual and who to contact for the information.
The Identification, Tasking and Networking (ITN) segment, which will allow law enforcement agencies to submit queries to IAFIS.
The FBI awarded a $200 million contract to systems integrator PRC to build the entire system. IAFIS will serve both law enforcement agencies and organizations where criminal background histories are a critical factor in consideration for employment. The FBI expects to populate a large part of its fingerprint database with images captured by state and local agencies with their own fingerprint scanning systems. In 1996, the Boston Police Department became the first agency to electronically submit fingerprint images to the FBI.
But scanning stations, with all the necessary hardware and software, are not cheap. Bill Casey, deputy superintendent for the Boston Police Department, estimates a full-fledged AFIS system can cost as much as $30,000, far beyond the reach of many small to mid-sized agencies.
Having learned its lesson from NCIC 2000, the FBI doesn't want to force every law enforcement agency into purchasing technology they may only use a couple of times per day or week. As a result, they have come up with the Interim Distributed Imaging System (IDIS). Jim Loudermilk, the FBI's IAFIS project advisor, called the system a low-cost version of AFIS. It doesn't have all the features of AFIS, but it will enable law enforcement agencies to submit 10-print cards to the FBI at a fraction of the cost for an AFIS.
IDIS incorporates an off-the-shelf scanner and software developed by the FBI. The scanner captures an image of the cards, while the software converts alphanumeric data -- such as name, address, Social Security number, sex, height and weight -- into a 2D bar code. When the image arrives at the FBI, personnel can just scan the bar code with a reader and capture data, instead of having data entry operators key it in.
According to Loudermilk, the FBI will provide the software free of charge to law enforcement agencies. This summer, a pilot project involving IDIS began in five locations. Casey described IDIS as a "neat solution that gives smaller police departments a lot of functionality for less money."
Using Intelligence Regionally
While the FBI's national crime networks highlight the importance of criminal identification, state and regional networks are busy supporting intelligence work and investigations for the law enforcement community. These networks are aimed at combating organized criminal activity, drug trafficking, criminal gangs and violent crime.
The umbrella program for these networks is the Regional Information Sharing Systems (RISS), a federally funded effort administered by the Bureau of Justice Assistance. RISS, with a $14.5 million annual budget, provides a host of services to nearly 5,000 law enforcement agencies around the country. These services include equipment loans, funds for the purchase of evidence or information to support investigations, and expert analysis of investigative data. RISS also supports a network to help agencies access information on criminal organizations and refer them to other agencies that have information on similar crime problems.
To manage such a large effort, RISS is broken down into six regional networks specializing in specific types of criminal intelligence and investigation. They include networks for New England (NESPIN), the mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes (MAGLOCLEN), the South (ROCIC), the Midwest (MOCIC), the Rocky Mountains (RMIN) and the West (WSIN).
WSIN (Western State INformation system) specializes in targeting narcotics activities in California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska and Hawaii. Founded in 1980, it is headquartered at the California Attorney General's office. According to Deputy Director Dolve Spitz, about 1,000 law enforcement agencies use WSIN, which has an annual budget of $2.5 million. "We're a civilian-run operation, very neutral," he said. "We assist local law enforcement agencies with investigative analysis of narcotics-based crime. We also loan out equipment and coordinate training."
WSIN's biggest high-tech component is the Statewide Integrated Narcotics System (SINS), a sophisticated system for managing and tracking complex drug case information. SINS brings together agencies that may be unknowingly investigating the same suspect, and integrates multi-jurisdictional information on suspects who cross geographic boundaries.
SINS consists of a high-speed communications network, a relational database management system for tracking cases, a geographic information system to display and plot narcotic enforcement activities, and a fingerprint identification system. Currently, SINS is implemented in federal, state and local law enforcement agencies within California and has been deployed nationally in six RISS projects. Additionally, the system has been integrated with the SouthWest Border states Anti-Drug Information System (SWBADIS), a cooperative program involving state and federal drug enforcement agencies.
Spitz pointed out that SINS is cooperative, with participating agencies providing information to the analysts based on a high level of trust. Narcotics investigations are highly sensitive operations, involving undercover work that could easily be compromised if information got into the wrong hands.
Unlike NCIC, SINS does not handle a high volume of queries involving small bits of data. Rather, it monitors critical events in a select geographic area based upon information submitted in hard copy to WSIN by participating agencies. Its benefit, explained Spitz, is notifying investigators of any conflicting operations and preventing redundant and potentially disastrous operations.
In addition to these regional networks and systems, local law enforcement agencies also participate in metropolitan networks, such as the Washington Area Law Enforcement System (WALES), the Cuyahoga Regional Information System (CRIS) serving the Cleveland area and a regional network (REJIS) serving the St. Louis metropolitan area. States have also developed their own crime networks to serve state and local agencies within state boundaries.
Networks and Lower Crime Rates
With so many crime networks and systems in operation across the country, there are bound to be battles over scarce funding dollars and friction whenever efforts are made to unify one network with another. Already, the FBI has seen what happens when the push for using the latest and greatest technology runs into fiscal reality at the local level.
The NCIC 2000 initiative has also struggled to bring a unified face to data needed to identify suspects, stolen property and missing persons. "Many of the criminal justice organizations are working with different criminal codes," JRSA's Zepp pointed out. "To translate information up to the national level, the FBI has to re-interpret the coding of local records to match NCIC codes." Unifying so many different sets of data has led to some of the problems NCIC 2000 has had in meeting its objectives and schedules.
The same problem is occurring at the state level, according to Zepp, as states try to develop unified information networks for criminal intelligence and identification. "There's one state that has six different forms and data collection systems for six different crime categories," he said.
Despite the bumps and bruises at the national and state levels, crime networks, by most accounts, are proving their worth by speeding up and improving the operational and intelligence efforts of law enforcement agencies. How much of a role they have played in actually reducing the nation's crime rate is anybody's guess. But police everywhere agree that the networks make their jobs safer while helping reduce the overall cost in the fight against crime.
August Table of Contents
