Closing the Case: Solving Violent Crimes Quickly and Efficiently with Public Records

Excellent article from Police Chief magazine by: Tom Joyce, Lieutenant, Commander (Retired), 79th Precinct Detective Squad and Cold Case Homicide Squad, New York City, New York, Police Department; and Director, Law Enforcement Strategy, LexisNexis Risk Solutions.


The job of a police officer is not easy. Tasked with apprehending criminals, maintaining public order and preventing and detecting crimes, police officers put their lives in danger every day. In order to do their jobs well, officers need reliable information and plenty of resources. Unfortunately, law enforcement agencies face daunting challenges: funding cuts, outdated information, and increasingly sophisticated criminals.

Adding to the challenges are the common assumptions that many crimes can be solved with the same cutting-edge technologies people see on television. In many cases, however, these are phantom solutions that police officers cannot access, even though the average citizen may expect it of them. While the entertainment industry has generated unrealistic expectations about the speed and the accuracy of some investigative tools, there are tools—such as public records and systems designed to make use of them—that exist right now, which can be used to develop leads for solving crimes more quickly and effectively.

Nowhere are these tools more needed than in the area of violent crime. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, the number of homicide victims per year, while much lower than its peak in 1991, is still significantly higher than the numbers from the 1950s, the 1960s, and the early 1970s. In fact, it is close to three times greater now than during these time periods.
 
The current economic downturn may further exacerbate this problem as all levels of government are being forced to cut budgets while citizens are committing crimes to financially survive. For these reasons, it is critical that law enforcement personnel, at the federal, the state, and the local levels, understand how public records data can help accelerate and simplify the investigative process, leading to faster, more efficient resolutions. This article explains why public records can and should play a key role in all law enforcement investigations. It shows why, regardless of the crime, public records information is an important tool in assisting law enforcement agencies, benefiting almost every point of an investigation, and answers the following questions:

• What are public records?
• Who benefits from public records?
• How do public records fit into the different stages of an investigation?
• How do public records play a role in specific violent crimes including homicides, robberies, and missing children?

What Are Public Records?

The term “public records” refers to information that has been filed or recorded by local, state, federal, or other government agencies, such as corporate and property records. Public records are created by the federal and local government (for example, vital records, immigration records, real estate records, driving records, and criminal records) or by the individual (for example, magazine subscriptions and voter registration). Most essential public records are maintained by the government, and many are accessible to the public either free of charge or for an administrative fee. Availability is determined by federal, state, and local regulations. Although public records are indeed public, their accessibility is not always simple, free, or easy. Some states have separate policies that govern the availability of information contained in public records. Public records are used to solve a variety of societal problems and are being leveraged by financial services firms to make improved lending decisions; by collections agencies to support a refuel of the economy; and by business and government institutions to detect and combat fraud, waste, and abuse and to reduce identity fraud, protect our borders, identify and locate sex offenders, and find and save missing children.

Public records have always been available in one form or another; however, the process to access and analyze these data has often been cumbersome, fragmented, and expensive. Technology developments over the past decade have enabled organizations to address this issue by centralizing the data and simplifying the process of identifying and retrieving relevant records at a moment’s notice. These developments have the effect of supercharging the ability to use public records to quickly locate people, detect fraud, uncover assets, and discover connections between suspects, witnesses, or associates.

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Cyber crime 'to overtake terrorism' as top threat facing the US

Iran has been identified as the main cyber threat to the United States as the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) claims that intrusions are not being detected.

The report by DNI James R. Clapper identified Iran as the main danger to America's information security. It said: “Russia and China are aggressive and successful purveyors of economic espionage against the United States. Iran's intelligence operations against the United States, including cyber capabilities, have dramatically increased in recent years in depth and complexity. We assess that FIS (foreign intelligence services) from these three countries will remain the top threats to the United States in the coming years.”

He also claimed that FIS have launched numerous computer network operations that target US government agencies, businesses and universities, and believed that "many intrusions into US networks are not being detected".

“Although most activity detected to date has been targeted against unclassified networks connected to the internet, foreign cyber actors have also begun targeting classified networks,” he said.

On insider threats, Clapper said insiders have caused significant damage to US interests through the theft and unauthorised disclosure of classified, economic and proprietary information and other acts of espionage.

Observing the sophistication of computer network operations (CNO), Clapper said these are likely to increase in coming years. He acknowledged the two strategic challenges regarding cyber threats as: the difficulty of providing timely, actionable warning of cyber threats and incidents, such as identifying past or present security breaches, definitively attributing them and accurately distinguishing between cyber espionage intrusions and potentially disruptive cyber attacks; and the highly complex vulnerabilities associated with the IT supply chain for US networks.

“In both cases, US government engagement with private sector owners and operators of critical infrastructures is essential for mitigating these threats,” he said.

According to FBI director Robert Mueller said cyber espionage, computer crime and attacks on critical infrastructure will surpass terrorism as the number one threat facing the US.

Click here to read the complete article in SC Magazine.

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Transnational Crime 'Abiding Threat' to National Security: US Intelligence

US intelligence chief James Clapper declared before a Senate committee that transnational criminal organizations, particularly those from Latin America, were an "abiding threat to US economic and national security interests." What particularly worries the US intelligence community is not only the current state and sophistication of Latin American transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), but their evolution, and their potential to develop ties not only with groups on the US list of terrorist organizations, but with foreign states and foreign intelligence agencies.

As far as Latin America is concerned, organized crime presents the single greatest threat to governments in the region, among them key US allies like Mexico, Colombia and El Salvador. Other countries under even greater threat from crime are Honduras, with one of the highest murder rates in the world, along with Guatemala, and the tiny nation of Belize.

In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Clapper mentioned the criminal activities that finance TCOs, and which are on the rise due to the globalized economy. He mentioned human smuggling, and the increase in kidnappings for ransom. He had Mexico in mind when he said this, but other nations in Latin America are seeing significant increases in kidnapping, among them Venezuela and smaller nations like Haiti and Paraguay. Clapper sees human trafficking as an increasingly attractive option to TCOs, due to what he described as a high profit, low risk dynamic. Human trafficking is seen as a higher risk activity for the US, due to the possibility that networks could be used to smuggle in terrorists interested in launching attacks within the mainland United States.

The US intelligence community sees a deepening relationship between terrorism and organized crime. Clapper stated that he believes terrorist organizations will "increasingly turn to crime and criminal networks for funding and logistics." Perhaps the best Latin American examples of this are Colombian rebel groups the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the National Liberation Army (ELN), which are both involved in cocaine and heroin trafficking as well as kidnapping and extortion.

Click here to read the full article from InSight

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