How many BOLO emails do you get per day? What about in the average week or month? For many officers, the answer is “too many.” Matt White, a former Navy pilot and CEO and cofounder of Multitude Insights, witnessed this mindset firsthand while riding along with officers from the Boston Police Department. At the time, White was a student at MIT, and after a Boston PD captain came to speak in one of his classes, his interest in law enforcement technology was piqued.
“I was sitting with a detective in a Boston suburb and he had his Outlook inbox up on the screen,” White said. “A bulletin came in and said ‘BOLO’ in all caps – it looked like an important email to me. The detective took the email and dumped it in the trash, and as an intelligence professional, my alarm bells went off.”
White asked the detective why he trashed the email and if he could take a look at it, and was told he gets 500 of them per month and doesn’t have time to look at them, clearly overwhelmed. Yet on second glance after White’s prodding, the detective recognized the individual pictured and started talking with another agency about the suspect. It turned out that several agencies connected the offender to a string of over a dozen breaking and entering charges – all from an email that had, at first, been put in the trash.
“That was my ‘aha!’ moment that I needed to build something to solve this problem,” White said.
Too many bulletins, not enough time
Sending bulletins via email sounds like an efficient and straightforward approach to investigations, but with the volume of BOLOs received every day, this method of communication has become less and less effective. Stand-alone emails don’t offer investigators any way to connect the dots by searching for data, collaborating with other agencies or analyzing trends within the intel itself. If the term “information overload” was ever applicable, it’s here.
White’s approach to law enforcement bulletins took shape in the form of a streamlined platform aptly named BLTN (pronounced “bulletin”). It allows officers to create, share and analyze bulletins in one central space, tailoring real-time information to your jurisdiction and even your assignment within your agency. BLTN acts as a resource for all BOLOs, ID-wanted flyers, situational awareness bulletins, officer safety alerts and requests for information, allowing you to see and analyze what’s most important to you.
“It’s designed to be an algorithmically driven feed,” explained Joe Ryan, Multitude Insights’ vice president of sales. “One of the big problems right now is all of this information is being emailed out, and if I’m a robbery detective, I might get 10 bulletins a day, and nine of them aren’t relevant to me. Because of that, I’m going to stop looking at those emails. We’ve designed the BLTN feed so that what I’m seeing is different as a robbery detective compared to what someone else sees.”
BLTN allows you to follow other departments and show their BOLOs in your feed, further providing the ability to analyze data and find connections between what used to be viewed as fragmented pieces of information. Users can select the incident types they want prioritized in their feed, positioning the most relevant data at the forefront.
Creating a bulletin is easy and the platform offers integrations with RMS vendors to prefill information and streamline the process. Once shared, BLTN sends approved information beyond neighboring jurisdictions.
“As you submit a bulletin, it’s available in our nationwide network as other investigators and analysts are searching for related incidents,” said Ryan. “That’s unique to us – we don’t know of anyone else creating a nationwide platform for sharing bulletins. We understand the bulletins you create tie back not only to other nearby departments but even departments in other states.”
Beyond agency sharing, the platform allows users to create a shareable link to send to other partners like banks, retail stores or fusion centers for easy collaboration.
Rich media options to help solve the case
Viewing a static image of a suspect is certainly better than nothing at all, but sometimes small details can be overlooked. Seeing someone from different angles in a video or even noticing if they have a distinct walk, for example, can help identify an offender among a sea of faces. With BLTN, embedded video can be added to a BOLO in a matter of seconds, taking a PDF from an antiquated piece of information to a modern video and audio intelligence sharing solution. Being able to leverage body cam footage or Ring video provided by a community member is a game-changer.
Interactive maps provide another layer of detail and help officers visualize patterns in criminal activity, while collaboration tools like hyperlinking to another bulletin within your own lets others view related incidents with ease. BLTN also offers real-time notifications that alert users when people make comments in a bulletin’s follow-up section so critical information can be acted on quickly and efficiently.
Just as easy as creating a bulletin, cancelling one is straightforward and is displayed in your customized feed, saving investigators the time of sending out an email just to notify others that a suspect has been caught.
Analyzing critical information with AI to increase case closures
Two heads are usually better than one, especially when it comes to law enforcement, but even the best investigators likely wish they had more time in the day to make connections across incidents. That’s where BLTN’s AI tool, SmartLink, shines.
SmartLink scans every bulletin for over 1,500 connection variables and links people, places, vehicles, patterns of behavior and even subtle semantic clues that might otherwise be overlooked. It only uses the data investigators already have at their fingertips, so it’s not generating new information, but rather acting as a second set of eyes.
While there’s no replacement for traditional investigative work, BLTN’s SmartLink acts as a support to investigators by finding patterns across both jurisdictions and timeframes to build stronger cases and provide a clear trail of sources for courtroom use. The entire BLTN platform, including SmartLink, is auditable and helps agencies maintain a secure CJIS work environment for bulletin and intel sharing.
“This is like having a crime analyst that reads everything in really intricate detail,” said White. “SmartLink augments the crime analyst with AI so nothing gets missed, and that’s what allows us to confidently tell agencies that we’re going to help increase their case closure rates. We’re going to help them move more quickly all while improving their intelligence process and reducing their time to case closure.”
Visit Multitude Insights for more information.
