S. Ariz. criminals may find it harder to hide PDAs let law agencies tap into Tucson police data
1/11/08

Criminals move easily over the hundreds of miles of southern Arizona mountains and desert, but information about their crimes doesn't.

Until recently, a Cochise County sheriff's deputy could arrest a notorious Tucson drug dealer and have no information about that person's past arrests in the next county over.

Although the area is a drug and human smuggling corridor, law enforcement agencies in southern Arizona have been reluctant or unable to share information.

The barriers to the data exchange are the egos of detectives afraid of losing local fame, agencies worried about outside interference and, perhaps most notably, the expense of installing computers in smaller departments and standardizing the way they sort data, local law enforcement officials said.

Jim Wysocki, information services director for Tucson police, has a plan he thinks will erode those obstacles.

Using grant money, Wysocki bought 260 Palm Treos - a cell phone that includes a personal digital assistant. He is distributing them among about 20 local and federal agencies. The Cochise County Sheriff's Office was one of the first to get them.

The way Wysocki figures it, people in the region are extraordinarily mobile, so police, and the information they collect, should be, too.

The devices allow law enforcement to access Tucson Police Department records from anywhere with cellular reception, Wysocki said. In return, other agencies submit interviews of suspects and others into TPD's database.

Wysocki hopes the result will be a more complete picture of criminal activity and travel patterns across the region. Police will be able to view not only a person's criminal history, but also any other contacts he or she has had with police, such as interviews at the scene of a crime.

Those interviews and officers' notes are key to the program because they go beyond what can be found in other inter-agency databases. "They'll help us fill in the blanks," Wysocki said.

As it is now, Tucson officers with laptop computers in their cars can access some state and national databases by entering a person's name, Sgt. Fabian Pacheco said.

He said Tucson police get returns on five simultaneous searches: driver's license information, national and state arrest warrants, arrest warrants from agencies within the county and a local background search.

The last search tells police how many times that person has been arrested, how many times that person has been a suspect and how many times that person has been implicated in a crime in another way, for example as a witness or associate of the arrested, Pacheco said.

But that information is local, which means if the person is a known bad guy in Cochise County, Tucson officers have no way of knowing that, he said. The system also does not allow access to case reports.

The PDAs would. Officers in other jurisdictions can use the device to search TPD databases by name, organization, location, vehicle or document, Wysocki said. Mug shots are available, too.
Wysocki's project started two years ago as an outgrowth of an information-sharing setup TPD had with the San Diego police. The cities still exchange information, but the project was stagnant. He was inspired by the PDAs that TPD motorcycle officers use to develop a mobile data access system.

Two years ago, Wysocki began looking for funding. Through Scientific Research Corp., a company based in Charleston, S.C., Wysocki was granted $600,000 in federal money, which was divided among TPD, for support staff and equipment; the University of Arizona, which will run effectiveness tests over the next couple of months; and Knowledge Computing Corp., the maker of Coplink, the investigative software TPD uses.
Wysocki then started asking agencies if they wanted to participate. About 20 agencies signed up, though some declined, namely the Border Patrol and the Tohono O'odham Police Department.

The state considers TPD's program a prototype, said Mary Marshall, spokeswoman for the Arizona Criminal Justice Commission. It wants to expand the program, called AZLink, and organize it in quadrants, with information nodes in Maricopa County, Phoenix, Tucson and Mesa.

Marshall called Wysocki a pioneer in Arizona's information-sharing. Improving information-sharing "truly is mission critical," she said. "And it usually takes a tragedy to get action."

Marshall said the piecemeal investigation of Mark Goudeau, suspected of being the so-called Baseline Killer who killed nine people in several Phoenix-area jurisdictions between 2004 and 2006, made the mission more important to Phoenix-area authorities. "Something like AZLink would have really helped," she said.

But the state has not allocated funding for AZLink or anything similar. Marshall said funding for the commission's $24 million information-sharing strategic plan was rejected by the Legislature last year.

About $1.7 million allocated to the Department of Public Safety, the repository of the state's criminal justice information, to improve its database also is getting axed this year because of needed budget cuts, Marshall said.

That database, the one police check for past convictions and time in prison, is only 67 percent complete, she said. It's wrong one-third of the time, largely because it relies on a paper system, she said.

Smaller agencies pay the highest toll for the state's lack of commitment to the program, said Bill Kalaf, the commission's information technology program manager.

"We have some rural police departments in need of basic desktop computers," he said. "We're not getting resistance from them. Where we're falling off is really at the state level."

The cooperation of smaller departments is key to a full picture of the state's criminal landscape. But those departments are the most cash-strapped, Wysocki said.

For departments such as the Tombstone Marshal's Office, the estimated $10,000 to $20,000 to outfit the agency with the technology needed to connect it with Tucson police or other agencies is out of the question.

The six-deputy department rents the handful of computers it has from Cochise County, said Marshal Merlin Smith.

Smith said he hopes to get in on TPD's project, but the information-sharing deal Tombstone has with Cochise County illustrates some of the barriers to information exchange.

Although Tombstone and Cochise County use the same software - which is not the same as what TPD uses - they do not share police reports.

Smith attributed that to security and privacy concerns.
"Each agency likes to maintain its own autonomy, and that makes it difficult to communicate," he said. "There's also a protection issue. Each agency has its own snitches."

Wysocki hopes the PDA project can help ease these fears and show that the benefits of sharing information outweigh the loss of power perceived by each agency, not to mention each detective.

After a week of use, Cochise County's nine detectives, who share five PDAs, seemed pleased with the program, especially with the mug shot feature, Sgt. Matt Szymeczek said.

"You can see right away whether the guy is who he says he is," Szymeczek said. "The only detractor is (reception) dead zones out in the desert."