by Martin Kasindorf, USA Today
Police agencies hunting the Washington-area sniper have seen the future, and it is technology.
Investigators are analyzing images from video cameras mounted at gas stations and shopping centers where shootings have occurred. A federal computer database has quickly established that slugs recovered from several crime scenes were fired by the same rifle. Crime mapping and psychology are profiling where a suspect may live and what personal demons are driving him.
The Washington area is the home of the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and respected state crime labs in Virginia and Maryland.
“It is the hub of forensics,” says Susan Narveson, director of the Phoenix police crime lab and president of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors. “They have available the very best there is in investigative technology.”
But the available methods haven’t caught the sniper yet. And that, criminologists say, points up the need to step up development of scientific tools to combat future menaces to public safety.
“This case is going to cause a big push for research and for implementation of new technologies,” says Cecil Greek, an associate professor of criminology at Florida State University. “The public is saying that we really have to stop this type of crime and therefore that we should use every technology at our disposal, even those that have been considered somewhat invasive, such as surveillance.”
Video cameras could play a bigger role in spotting the sniper, depending on where he goes. Since the early 1990s, more than 2 million surveillance cameras have been installed at ATMs and convenience stores, and at traffic signals and on high-crime streets in more than 100 cities. If the sniper shoots in downtown Washington, he’s likely to be seen by police monitoring hundreds of government cameras aimed at streets, subways and federal buildings. Downtown Baltimore has 64 cameras that have cut street crime up to 15%, according to the Downtown Partnership of Baltimore, a business group.
Other tools being shaped for the future don’t quite have the sci-fi sweep of Minority Report, the recent movie in which Tom Cruise plays a Washington detective in 2054 who solves murders before they happen. But concepts are promising. Measures include:
* Spy satellites -- The FBI can request high-resolution photos from the Pentagon’s National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Neither agency will say whether they’ve used satellites to try to pinpoint the sniper’s van. Police in many localities buy photos from the commercial IKONOS satellite to map a shooter’s line of sight. One drawback: Satellites can’t read a license plate. “You could use aerial drones, unpiloted vehicles like Global Hawk, with high-resolution cameras,” NASA spokesman David Steitz says. The Pentagon has agreed to use its surveillance aircraft to help solve the sniper case.
* More sophisticated methods of identifying a suspect from the DNA of blood, sweat, tears, saliva, hairs and teeth. “Advances in DNA analysis are the most dramatic,” Narveson says.” We can look at smaller, more degraded DNA fragments.” Future mobile crime labs may include a portable device that can collect DNA and quickly link it with a convicted offender whose characteristics are stored in a database.
* Scanners. Those in development could use chemistry, lasers or infrared energy to establish the composition of a hard-to-identify bit of evidence without destroying it, as frequently happens now.
* Countersniper systems. These systems, sold to the military by various U.S. and European companies, try to detect a sniper by picking up muzzle flash, blast or a bullet’s shock wave with infrared or sound sensors. Infrared sensors also try to estimate a bullet’s trajectory by its heat signature and backtrack to the sniper’s location. Tests have produced mixed results.
* Devices using radar, X-rays and other methods to spot a suspect or a weapon behind a building’s walls. The Justice Department is funding several of these projects. One government lab is working on a system that would electronically “tag” a person carrying a weapon in a crowd.
* Controversial “brain fingerprinting.” Police show a suspect a crime-scene photo while he’s hooked up to scalp sensors that allegedly can tell whether he’s seen the place before.
Better communication among law enforcement agencies is “less glamorous but absolutely paramount” in terror incidents, says Richard Chace, spokesman for the Security Industry Association. Different agencies use a host of radio frequencies. If a street cop could send a pager or cellphone message that everyone could read at once, many agencies could converge on a crime location, he says.
Technology is no panacea, at least not now, he says. Chace predicts the sniper case “is going to be broken by dumb luck -- the person slipping up, or eyewitnesses.”