By Mike Wiggins, The Grand Junction Sentinel (Grand Junction, Colo.)
When Johnny Herrera approached the parking lot of a local windshield repair business late one night in April, allegedly with the intention of stealing a vehicle parked there, he had more than a Dodge truck waiting for him.
Sitting nearby were several Grand Junction police officers. They surrounded the truck and pulled Herrera out of the driver’s seat before he could make off with it.
Officers had staked out the area earlier that night. But this was not a random decision, a hunch or an educated guess. Officers were responding to information showing a recent pattern of crime in the area and suggesting more could happen there again.
For Grand Junction police, Herrera’s arrest represented more than officers catching an alleged car thief. It was a success story of how the agency is using technology and diligent recordkeeping to try to head off crime while it’s happening or before it happens, a practice that’s relatively new to law-enforcement agencies and one rarely seen in departments the size of Grand Junction’s.
“I’m confident we’re one of the leading agencies in the state, if not the country, about information that’s getting out to officers,” said Police Chief Greg Morrison. “This is pretty cutting-edge stuff.”
The process of gathering and analyzing reports of crime and using that hard data to try to determine where it will happen next marks a radical departure from traditional policing, where officers react to crime and primarily base their decisions on how to combat it on anecdotal evidence or “gut feelings, best guesses,” Morrison said.
Whatever success police have experienced with this shift in philosophy is due largely to a woman who was initially looking to work for them for free.
When Adrienne Kaga approached the Police Department in January of last year, she simply wanted to volunteer. When she mentioned she was good with computers, police had her help reformat their policy manual and rewrite their computer database.
It wasn’t until later that they learned Kaga, a graduate of Georgetown University and recipient of a master’s degree in business from Northwestern University, had much greater abilities.
Morrison had planned to develop a crime analyst position as part of a community-policing, problem-solving thrust he has emphasized in the department since he became police chief in 2001. When a half-time position in another area opened up, he turned it into the crime-analyst job and filled it with Kaga.
Last year, she joined patrol officers, city planners and code-enforcement officials and used geographic information-system software to identify 44 distinct neighborhoods in the city as part of a new neighborhood-beat system. Under that system, officers are assigned to patrol a certain area of the city so they can become familiar with its residents, businesses and features in order to more effectively handle crime in that area.
Kaga takes property-crime reports she receives and plots the crimes out on neighborhood beat maps, showing what type of crime occurred and where. She meets every week with patrol captains and lieutenants to share that information, which is then passed along to the patrol officers.
Kaga breaks down the data to show criminal activity in a week, a month and year-to-date, as well as to compare crimes from one month this year with its counterpart last year. She digs deep enough to identify exactly what items are being stolen and develop a profile of who might be breaking into cars, spray-painting buildings or stealing vehicles.
Police use that information to identify hot spots for crime and possible criminal trends.
“Through crime analysis and mapping, there’s a much better chance of estimating where these crimes are going to happen and preventing them,” Morrison said.
In Herrera’s case, authorities set up a surveillance after Officer Geraldine Earthman noticed in the information she was receiving from Kaga that a number of burglaries, car break-ins and auto thefts had occurred in the course of a week in the area around West Gunnison Avenue and U.S. Highway 6&50. They believed the data showed the crimes were being committed by the same person or group of people, and that the perpetrator might return.
So when Herrera showed up, officers were ready for him. They reportedly found him in possession of keys for two other vehicles that had been stolen.
The crime analysis and mapping, surveillance and arrest all happened in a 24-hour period.
“To me, it’s so much common sense,” Kaga said of her job. “There’s no magic to it.”
While it may seem a logical approach to policing, it remains a novel one.
Morrison said the concept was pioneered by the New York City Police Department and indicated he believes there’s only a few police departments in Colorado that employ crime analysts.
Here in Grand Junction, police emphasized crime analysis on burglaries and thefts from autos after noticing a spike in those offenses from 2002 to 2003.
But in the first five months of this year, burglaries dropped 21 percent (272 to 216) and thefts from autos dropped 22 percent (420 to 329), compared to the same time period last year. That, despite a 5 percent rise in all reported crimes (4,804 to 5,053).
“I’m very confident there’s a direct correlation” between the effort to crack down on burglaries and thefts and the decrease in those crimes, Morrison said.
The Police Department’s accomplishments have drawn the attention of other organizations. Last year, the department received the Pioneer Policing Award from the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police. Last week, Kaga and Morrison flew to Reno, Nev., to give a presentation at a national conference that annually spotlights innovation in local government.
Police are now exploring how they can apply crime analysis to crimes against people.
“I think it’s truly an effective way to police a community,” Morrison said. “We’re kind of taking the crawl, walk, run approach to this. So far the crawl and walk has worked out well, so I can’t wait until we’re running. I think the possibilities are endless.”