Partners in (solving) crime

Crime knows no borders, and neither do the criminals committing those acts.

The Sherburne County Sheriff's Office is hoping to expand an effort aimed at catching criminals who are more sophisticated and mobile, bringing together St. Cloud-area law enforcement agencies to share data on crimes, trends and suspects. The Regional Criminal Tracking and Analysis Group already facilitates that sharing, something the county hopes to enhance by including an intelligence center in the expansion plans for the county's government center.

That center would be a real-time crime analysis and data sharing hub that can connect officers and investigators with information that previously might take days or weeks to get. It's modeled after an intelligence center in Hennepin County that started as a way to connect all of the cities within the county and expanded to become a multi-county crime analysis network.

“The future of policing will, without a doubt, rely more on intelligence and the work of analysts to link together crimes and criminal activity that occurs across jurisdictional lines,” said Sherburne County Sheriff Joel Brott.

Brott has one crime analyst and hopes to add another when the intelligence center is operational, in early 2019. He will invite surrounding jurisdictions to join what is called RCTAG, including St. Cloud, Stearns, Mille Lacs and Benton counties and cities such as Big Lake, Becker and Princeton.

The cost of the intelligence center is included in the budget for the expansion of the government center. The cost of that expansion and renovation is estimated to be $61 million. Brott said that intelligence center technology will be paid for with jail revenue. He doesn't intend to ask participating agencies to pay to join RCTAG and utilize the space and technology.

William Jones is the criminal intelligence analyst and investigator for Sherburne County. He meets once a month with the other RCTAG members and updates a secure website that sends out crime trend reports, suspect "work-ups" and officer safety alerts.

"With the criminal intelligence center, we will provide an opportunity on a daily basis for officers and investigators to come together and share patterns, trends of criminal activity and persons of interest," Jones said.

Information that used to take days to get from one department to a neighboring department can be shared instantly, opening new lines of communication between departments that might not have spoken with each other on a regular basis.

"People are under the assumption that we're all on the same wavelength and that's not true," Jones said. "We're on different radio frequencies. We're on different databases. We don't really have the communications the public thinks we do."

RCTAG and the intelligence center will change that.

The center is based on an idea that Hennepin County Sheriff Rich Stanek had when he was a Minneapolis police officer. He took the idea to Hennepin when he was elected sheriff. It started with connecting dozens of police departments in the county. That effort, called Criminal Information Sharing & Analysis, expanded with the creation of the intelligence center, called the Metro Regional Information Collaborative.

There are eight metro counties and the FBI participating in MRIC, linking agencies that serve as many as 4 million people.

Stanek in late December discussed reports that reached his desk that day about nine aggravated business robberies in the metro area. Convenience stores, a coffee shop and a hair salon were among the crime sites. The businesses were in Minneapolis, Plymouth and Rosemount and were similar in how they were robbed.

"How would Minneapolis know what is going on out in Plymouth? How would Plymouth know what is going on out in Rosemount?" Stanek said. "That's what CISA and MRIC do together in terms of their information sharing power."

MRIC tied one suspect to seven robberies in metro-area cities of New Hope, Richfield, Minneapolis, Brooklyn Park, Plymouth and Brooklyn Center, he said.

Getting that suspect information from one city to another in the past might have happened through a fax days or weeks after a crime. Or it might never have happened.

“It would have been happenstance in the past,” said Spencer Bakke, a lieutenant with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office who overseas MRIC.

Analysts there have access to public and private databases and records management systems of various law enforcement agencies.

Bakke cited a string of residential burglaries happening last summer in several Hennepin County cities. The perpetrators were entering through garages, using garage door openers that were in unlocked vehicles.

The burglar sometimes was going into the houses where garages were attached. There were more than 40 burglaries spanning three counties, Bakke said.

The information sharing at MRIC showed the same pattern across a wide geographic area.

Investigators started by letting the public know about the trend and how to protect against it. That led to the identification and arrest of a suspect.

Without MRIC “it would have been very difficult to link these crimes together,” Bakke said.

When the crime analysts call a meeting to discuss a crime trend affecting more than one agency, there is a success rate of 85 percent to 90 percent, Bakke said.

The CISA unit in Hennepin County received 4,948 requests for information from Hennepin County or other agencies in 2015. Those requests could range from real-time investigations to seeking a detailed background investigation of a suspect.

MRIC started in fall 2012 and has expanded to include 22 staffers from 11 different agencies.

On a recent day there was a vehicle chase where an analyst took over for dispatchers and talked directly to the officer chasing the fleeing vehicle. The analyst was sharing information about the vehicle, its driver, the criminal history of the driver, including whether he had been involved in incidents with firearms. He was able to convey known previous addresses for the man who was fleeing and associates who might live in the area near the chase.

“A police agency, such as the Sherburne County Sheriff’s Office, must use all of the technology available to it in order to track, analyze, locate and solve crimes in partnership with other police agencies," Brott said. "The successful apprehension of much more sophisticated and mobile criminals depends on it.”

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