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continued from "Intelligence-Led Policing" page 13 vehicles, for example - so that potentially relevant information can be cross-referenced and used agency-wide. These links between records will allow a user (with the right credentials) to search for and retrieve any piece of information previously entered, while providing the data foundation for searching and reporting to make it easy to hone in on the right information. With the right RMS data foundation in place, intelligence- led policing doesn’t need to start at the top and be pushed down through the ranks – it can start right with the individual officer on the street. In fact, with the data they have available from the CODY Anywhere RMS, Upper Moreland Police Department patrol squads can make their own decisions on when and where to focus. "We give our officers the autonomy to direct their response based on the information they get," says Chief Murphy. Because there's solid data behind it, "I have faith in them." If a data search shows a certain time of day or day of week pattern in an incident type, for example, they can adjust their patrol schedules in response. As a result, resources can be applied more proactively and more quickly. The intel the data is showing them, then, supplements the intelligence gathering that goes on at the command level. "Through our RMS, I review incidents every day," says Chief Murphy. "If I see something that looks like a trend, as we did recently with theft from vehicles, we use the data to put out intelligence bulletins to establish directed patrol." Every week, he gets an automatically- generated, custom report on specific crimes that he wants to "keep an eye on," including burglaries, aggravated assaults and thefts. Then, while still within his RMS, Chief Murphy, “can go right down to the original reports to see if we need to address an issue directly." DIGGING DEEPER Most legacy RMS solutions allow some level of search, but how deep into the data that search can go makes all the differ- ence. A legacy RMS might support a search against a specific suspect name and show known associates linked directly to that individual in prior incident reports. An intelligent RMS search, however, will go far beyond that. "Searchability is crucial to us," maintains Castle Shannon Lieutenant McKeown. “In our RMS, we can search everything." That includes incident report factors, like method of entry in a burglary, that can link incidents, establish patterns and solve crimes. You can even search incident narrative comments and other "free form" text. One type of search that allows users to ‘dig deeper’ is the State- ment Search capability found in CODY RMS. Using this data-mining tool, users can actually build the search ‘statement’ themselves. Because they're all linked in the database, the search can involve multiple record types or tables, such as incidents, persons, address- es, and vehicles. A search might, for example, look for incidents be- tween a certain date range, where a white male with brown hair was involved, and a red car was involved. Plus, these searches can be saved and run over and over again. "I rely on the Statement Search capability all the time," says Chief Murphy of the Upper Moreland Police Department. "There's no limit to what you can search on, and I'm impressed with how detailed and accurate it is." Lieutenant Stephen Schaffer , Director of Police Communica- tions for the Ocean City (NJ) Police Department and an enrollee in the January 2020 FBINAA session, points specifically to the

Fielded Search capability, where a module’s fields are presented for the user to fill in specific search criteria. "Your search can be as wide or as narrow as you want it to be," says Lieutenant Schaffer. In searching incidents, for example, you can use just a few fields in your search, such as incident type and location, and get potentially hundreds of matches, which might be useful for planning and allocating resources, or enter 20 different fields and drill down to the two or three matches useful for a specific investigation. BEYOND RMS Querying data and pulling reports are vital, but intelligence- led policing demands even more. The intelligent RMS provides powerful tools for investigators, as well as gang and drug units and other specialized teams that need to drill down even deeper to uncover and display patterns in the data. To meet this need, us- ers of the CODY RMS also have at their fingertips a Data Visualizer that studies the data (and the links between entities in the system) and generates inferential patterns; resulting association webs are presented in different visual link-analysis formats including link trees, charts, and graphs. The increasing demand for housing ‘non-RMS’ information has also become critical. Law enforcement agencies are increas- ingly finding useful incident-related information - including text, video and images - on social media. The intelligent RMS must be able to retain this information in a way that can be easily searched and linked to relevant incidents, persons and cases. Castle Shannon Lieutenant McKeown notes that "investiga- tion-wise, the ability to not have to warehouse that information (separately), but to just attach it digitally to the record and bring it up when needed, brings a lot of value to us." Even where information, such as in-car and body worn camera video relevant to an incident or case, is stored separately, having a searchable reference in the RMS will make it easier to find. Ocean City Police Department detectives "go to CODY first to see if there is a reference," according to Chief Prettyman. GETTING THERE FROM HERE: LESSONS LEARNED A key consideration in deciding to switch to an intelligent RMS is the conversion of data from the legacy RMS. And here it's less about the technical competencies of the RMS provider and more about its understanding and commitment. The provider of an intelligent RMS understands that any piece of data in the legacy system - however dated - may be critical to building associations in a new case, so every possible record should be converted. The Castle Shannon Police Department recognized the importance of retaining its data when it converted twenty-five years of data from its legacy RMS . 'You don't want to lose any data," says Chief Tru- ver. When a new case involves someone you've dealt with before, "you don't know what you don't know," if the old data hasn't been migrated to the new system. The conversion and migration process went off "without a hitch" he added. Lieutenant McKeown, who was directly involved in the process, recalls that "I can't think of a single piece of infor- mation that we lost during the transition; if there wasn't a place to put it, CODY found a place. It would have been easy to say 'We can't do that'; but they found a way to make it work."

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