City Hall stymies LAPD
Anti-crime software acquisition delayed

08/17/04
by James Nash

City Hall bureaucracy has stymied the Los Angeles Police Department's efforts to buy a $2 million crime-fighting computer system that would help in the arrests of thousands of gang members a year and free up dozens of officers for other duties, the Daily News has learned.

LAPD officials hope to revive the year-old efforts to buy a widely used computer program called COPLINK at a meeting today. COPLINK allows police to target violent criminals by linking various databases -- including sex-offender registries, gang databases and inmate records -- providing ready access to information that otherwise requires a time-consuming search through each system.

"I wish that this would be moving a lot faster," said LAPD Assistant Chief George Gascon, who is championing the COPLINK program.

"For me, it's frustrating. Without endorsing the particular software company, these capabilities are very critical to our crime-fighting ability. We have to be smarter than other agencies because we don't have the people to throw at the problem."

The COPLINK proposal isn't dead, but is being considered as part of the LAPD's overall technology package, said Ron Wilkerson, who was hired in June as the department's chief information officer.

The LAPD has fewer than 9,200 officers -- down by more than 100 from last year's level. Although most categories of crime are declining, the homicide rate as of July 31 was up 3.3 percent over the comparable period last year, according to the latest LAPD data available.

According to a report prepared by a consultant for Chief Legislative Analyst Ron Deaton, COPLINK technology would allow LAPD officers to increase arrests of gang members by 83 a week above the current average of 128.

In addition, the time saved by using COPLINK would free up 128 officers for other duties, according to the report by consultant Mike Mount. His conclusions were based largely on the experience of the police department in Tucson, Ariz., which has used COPLINK since the mid-1990s.

COPLINK would cost the LAPD $1.6 million to $2.2 million to start, possibly defrayed by grants, and about $250,000 to $350,000 a year to operate, officials said.

Tucson Police Department Detective Tim Petersen said COPLINK has made a big difference in that 500,000-population city, which has struggled with gang violence. He said the program is easy to use and particularly efficient in spotting gang members who assume multiple identities.

"We definitely have used it to solve or assist in dozens of cases where we (otherwise) may not have been able to solve it or would have taken a lot longer to do it," Petersen said.

COPLINK digs through crime records to find connections of people, places and things, and it gives officers ready access to a catalog of information about suspects and crime locations, he said.

More than 100 U.S. cities use COPLINK, said Robert Griffin, president of Knowledge Computing Corp., a Tucson company that licenses the program.

Although LAPD leaders were enthusiastic about COPLINK, officials at City Hall put the brakes on the purchase by insisting that police take more time to evaluate how the program would work in Los Angeles and to consider competing programs, Griffin said.

"The police were extremely unhappy about the opinion that they needed to go with (a request for competing proposals)," Griffin said. "The faster we get things in, the more lives we're going to save. I don't know about the politics of (the delay), but it wasn't the LAPD."

Deaton said he wants to make sure the LAPD isn't spending money on technology that might be incompatible with databases already in use, as well as ones in development on complaints against officers, incidents involving use of force by officers and trends involving officer behavior.

"The concept of having crime data and allocating people accordingly is something I fully support. ... Getting accurate data and processing it so it can be used in that area is the difficult task," Deaton said.

He declined to comment further on the reasons for the delay.

The LAPD has long suffered from backward and incompatible technology. The monitor overseeing the LAPD's compliance with a federal consent decree mandating reforms has repeatedly faulted the department for its slowness in developing a program to track officer behavior.

The LAPD's new chief technology officer, Ron Wilkerson, conceded that the LAPD is saddled with "somewhat disjointed" technology.

Wilkerson, who was hired in June, is exploring whether COPLINK can be integrated into the LAPD, Chief William Bratton said.

City Councilman Jack Weiss, who serves on council committees dealing with the LAPD and with technology, said he's frustrated at the slow progress of LAPD technology.

"I think that the LAPD is rather technology-light," Weiss said. "These sorts of programs, when you get an innovative leader like George Gascon behind them, really should be put into place.

"I've seen the wheels turn mighty slowly around here," Weiss said. "Sometimes that's the nature of how we do things."