CHICAGO'S WEST SIDE, the Shakespeare District, North
Campbell Avenue, three blocks from Division, Wednesday night, November 19.
Unmarked police cruiser unit 8i responds to a 9:06 p.m. dispatch. Violation of
protection order.
The cruiser pulls up to a two-story brick house.
Several women stand watching on the sidewalk and neighboring stoops. Several men
are walking on the other side of the street, and two are hanging out in front of
a store, also watching.
One of the women, Veronica, tells Sgt. Greg
Hoffman that her estranged husband, ordered by the court to keep his distance,
tried to approach her. He was wearing a hat for disguise. "He never wears a
hat," Veronica tells Hoffman. He took off in a truck with friends, she says,
pointing out one of her husband's associates who stayed behind, a tall man
wearing red sweats. Another patrol car pulls up, and officers round up the men
across the street, including the man in red. The men stand, spread-eagled
against a stockade fence, detained by Hoffman and Assistant Deputy
Superintendent Ron Huberman.
After the cops pat them down and start
asking them about Veronica's husband, Huberman uses the patrol car's
touch-screen notebook (one of 2,000 outfitted in Chicago Police cars) to run
Veronica's address. He touches "send," and less than five seconds later, four
incident reports dating back to early 2003, mined from the department's
relational database, appear on screen. Domestic battery. Two cases of violating
a protection order. A suspiciously parked car. Veronica's abusive husband
doesn't seem to know how to stay away. He also doesn't know that tonight's
incident will join 8.5 million others in the CLEAR (Citizen Law Enforcement
Analysis and Reporting) system, the Chicago Police Department's unique
enterprisewide relational database.
Why
the CPD Won the Grand CIO Enterprise Value Award
This violation isn't
the most serious crime reported tonight. There are gang wars going on in the
Shakespeare and several of the other 25 districts the police use to carve up
Chicago's 228 square miles. But violating a protection order is a deadly warning
sign. Four nights earlier, suspected domestic violence left 19-year-old Alia
Chavez dead of a stab wound in her basement apartment on North Rockwell.
 On
the night of Nov. 19, Assistant Deputy Superintendent Ron Huberman (right) and
Sgt. Greg Hoffman answered a complaint. They rousted several men, frisked them
and then turned to CLEAR, the Chicago Police Department's unique enterprisewide
relational database. | That's one reason the
officers questioned the men against the stockade fence. They were collecting
physical identification and contact data on serially numbered "contact cards"
that will be entered into the database and cross-referenced with known
associates—including Veronica's husband. Now, if one of these men does something
wrong, the police will not only have the offender's name and criminal history,
they'll know who he knows and who knows him.
This sort of
intelligence-driven police work is a strategic objective for most metropolitan
PDs, since 9/11 launched a new era of crime-fighting, but the Chicago Police
Department (CPD) is leading the way. And it's something of a miracle that it's
happening here, in the country's second largest police force after New York
City's.
Chicago's pursuit of IT value has been methodical and tenacious.
Obtaining and maintaining funding, overcoming user resistance and laboring
through drawn-out training sessions have been a continuous struggle. With
nothing available to buy that met its vision, Chicago needed to partner with
database giant Oracle. Three years and $40 million later, 50 percent of the
original vision and applications have been implemented. But even at the half-way
point, the CPD has proven to the city, county, state and beyond that IT
can work in big city policing and does reduce crime.
For
those reasons, the Chicago Police Department is this year's sole recipient of
CIO's top enterprise value distinction—the Grand CIO Enterprise Value Award.
"Enterprise value in its highest form is the opportunity for IT to transform a
business, to bring a whole new model into existence," says Rebecca R. Rhoads,
CIO of Raytheon and an Enterprise Value Awards judge. "The Chicago Police
Department totally changed the game."
CLEAR is an enterprisewide vision
of how anytime, anywhere access to centralized, relational data can empower
intelligence-driven crime-fighting. While other police departments are
struggling to integrate legacy data and applications, Chicago decided in the
late 1990s that to have maximum impact, all policing intelligence should be
accessible in one spot, with all tools leveraging and feeding that repository.
The CLEAR database, deployed in April 2000 and now topping 200GB, is the
foundation for a growing set of integrated CLEAR applications used by all of the
department's 13,600 officers and most of its 3,000 civilians, plus an
exponentially expanding base of users outside the city limits. In fact, the
state of Illinois' crime data system will be replaced by CLEAR, which will serve
as the State Police's data repository. Typically, 1,200 concurrent users run
more than 7,000 queries daily against data that includes:
Arrest reports
Live
cases' statuses
Criminal activity by district, beat, street and address
Rap sheets with aliases, nicknames and distinguishing physical marks
Digital
mug shots and fingerprints
Seized
property and evidence tracking
Forensics reports
Personnel data—number of arrests by each officer and many other performance
metrics
Clear's Crime-Stopping ROI
The national crime
rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, after a decade-long decline, according to
FBI reports. But crime in the Windy City has continued to fall. In fact, in the
past three years—the period CLEAR has been operating—Chicago rates have dropped
16 percent; that's 34,564 fewer murders, rapes, robberies and other crimes
against a person. And Chicago's leaders have no qualms about attributing their
success in bucking the nationwide trend to the use of CLEAR's tools. "Crime in
Chicago is declining, and I think it will continue to decline because of our
ability to be information-driven," says Barbara McDonald, deputy superintendent
of administrative services and initiator of the CLEAR vision.
| CLEAR
Closes Cases |
Beginning with CLEAR's implementation in 2001,
the CPD began solving more crimes (meaning an arrest was made or a case closed
by other means) and exceeding national averages
 Read More
| Chicago is also solving crimes and closing
cases at a higher rate across the board. The percent of 2003 sexual assault
cases solved through the first quarter is more than 69 percent, up from 43
percent in 2001, and the rate for solving aggravated assaults is up 13 percent
from 2001. Across all crime categories, CPD detectives are solving nearly one
out of three reported crimes, up from less than one out of four in 2001, and the
department is besting the average crime-solving rates for the nation and for the
eight largest U.S. cities (see "CLEAR Closes Cases," right).
Because the CPD envisioned CLEAR as an integrated, countywide
crime-fighting tool, it's granted free, real-time access to law enforcement
agencies in Cook County. But the demand quickly spread beyond the county. More
than 225 agencies across Illinois now access the database to catch crooks, who
are increasingly mobile. In many cases, these agencies are adding their own
arrest data to CLEAR.
Further afield, Indiana has expressed interest in
the source code, and the CPD has demonstrated CLEAR to the Los Angeles and
Washington, D.C., police departments. Introducing a CLEAR presentation to
leaders of his force, Washington Metropolitan Police Chief Charles Ramsey said,
"I don't know of any other system like this in any other agency." The CLEAR
system, he continued, "represents the best practice in the U.S."
Adds
Washington Police CIO Phil Graham, "The CPD has created a model application that
other law enforcement agencies should be learning from if not adopting." The
D.C. force is in the exploratory phase of evaluating how well CLEAR's
applications, data warehouse and front-end interfaces will meet its needs.
A Badge, a Gun and a Computer
How does the
Chicago police force use CLEAR tools and data to solve and reduce crime? They
hunt for clues and matches, same as they do on the street, just much more
efficiently. For example, a search for all records containing "bunny" tattoos
takes four seconds and turns up 85 matches from 2003. (Playboy's rabbit
and Bugs are the most common forms of bunny.) Enlargeable full-color digital mug
shots accompany each match. A search on the nickname "The Russian" turns up a
man with 14 arrests, mostly for assaults. The location data with each arrest
shows the offender bouncing between Chicago and Mount Prospect, a suburb. Police
in Mount Prospect (who have access to CLEAR) investigating any assault by anyone
nicknamed The Russian will zero right in on this guy, who apparently gets out of
jail as frequently as The Penguin or The Riddler.
A home in Streamwood,
Ill., was invaded by two black men in 2003. The victims heard one call the other
by a nickname. Streamwood detectives, searching on that name in CLEAR via their
extranet connection, found matches. Detectives used the integrated mug shot
system to generate a virtual lineup of these likely suspects on a computer
screen. The victims identified the pair, and the cops nailed them.
The most advanced use of computing in
reducing crime is predictive analysis. The Deployment Operations Center (DOC), a
20-officer special unit, uses street intelligence, CLEAR data and a new CLEAR
crime-mapping tool to identify potential hot spots, particularly for gang
activity. "Our initial vision for information-driven policing has come
full-circle with DOC," says McDonald. "They're using CLEAR data to anticipate
where crime may occur so we can have the resources there before it
happens."
When mapped by CLEAR, locations of recent gang-related crime
(indicated on the screen maps by little green gun icons) reveal patterns that
point to areas where rival gangs are likely to cross paths. "I know four gangs
are vying for dominance in this area," says Sgt. David Betz, pointing to a map
with a relatively clear zone of several blocks, ringed by a dozen gun icons. "I
can drop 35 extra police in this one area and saturate it." DOC officers make
weekly recommendations to district chiefs to redeploy patrol officers in these
locations. They also supply them with gang member suspects to look out for. "I
can use CLEAR to find their hangouts, nicknames, and put faces with the names,"
Betz says.
The prediction concept seems to be working. Despite
escalating gang hostilities citywide, saturated locations have remained
relatively quiet. Earlier in 2003, before DOC began its work, the city was up 25
homicides over the same period in the prior year. As of November, the city was
down 33 homicides from the same period in 2002. Chicago's 2003 murder
rate was down 7 percent from the previous year, the lowest since 1968.
The Productivity Payoff
Predictive analysis may
be the most interesting contributor to cutting crime, but boring old
productivity is making a difference too. Consider these workflow improvements
enabled by CLEAR.
Accessing mug shots: From up to four days without CLEAR to four seconds with
CLEAR.
Pulling
a rap sheet: From four hours from request to receipt, down to seconds.
Logging
in seized property and evidence: From three hours, down to one hour.
Checking offenders' prison status and release dates: From 30 minutes, down to
one minute.
For legal reasons, arrest reports must follow a carefully
prescribed approval chain, capturing signatures attesting to the truth of the
information. Instead of paper reports going to watch commanders' inboxes to sit
and wait, automated reports are electronically routed via XML file transactions
to the right people, capturing their digital signatures-a change for which the
department won grudging acceptance from the courts.
A "copy" function
allows officers to cut and paste the same data from one report to the next. This
function alone saves police so much time that one officer, who brought five
offenders into the station on the same arrest, refused to default to the paper
forms when the CLEAR arrest system went down. He just waited for it to come back
up.
Overall, the department estimates that these efficiencies have given
it the equivalent of 1.2 officers for every one it had prior to CLEAR. Labor
savings total 193 full-time equivalents, including $5.3 million in overtime pay
reductions. Productivity gains allowed the elimination of 345 clerical
positions. Most important, 90 once-deskbound officers have been redeployed to
the streets.
All told, the department estimates labor savings of $88
million from 2001 through 2003, more than offsetting the $40 million investment
in CLEAR.
Clear's Hero
Why is this happening in Chicago
and not in your town? First, Chicago has a tradition of aggressive IT adoption
dating back to 1984 when it first began capturing crime data in internal
databases. It was willing to swallow the big up-front cost of developing CLEAR's
enterprise database. (Oracle took nearly 10 months to develop the data model
alone.) Second, the commanders say, there's the leadership of Mayor Richard
Daley, who made CLEAR one of his priorities, and the past few CPD
superintendents, who have made IT part of their agenda.
The third reason
is Assistant Deputy Superintendent Ron Huberman.
"He took us under his
wing and pushed resources, space, dollars and people to us," says Sgt. Diane
Shaw, who is on the team that built CLEAR's long-in-development and latest
case-reporting application.
 Officer Robert Espino (left) and Assistant Deputy Superintendent Ron
Huberman run an address through the CLEAR system via their patrol car's
touch-screen notebook. In less than five seconds, they have four incident
reports. | "Ron has made the difference with
executive commitment. It wasn't good before," adds Hardik Bhatt, director of
development.
"Without Ron," sums up Deputy Superintendent McDonald,
"this wouldn't have happened."
Sworn in as an officer in 1995, Huberman,
32, worked the streets, and then in October 2000 joined IS as its director.
Despite having no IT background (he squeezed in an MBA and master of arts in
social services in 2000), Huberman realized the department was not leveraging IT
the way it could. "I've worked the street and understand what officers need to
solve crimes," Huberman says. He put himself forward to help conceive and
execute CLEAR, which is now his main responsibility as head of information
services, R&D and policy, and the records division.
Huberman also
brought in other cops to work on development. Beginning in 2001 with an ad in
the Chicago Police Daily Bulletin inviting officers with an interest in
IT to join him, he now has 18 officers detailed full-time on CLEAR development
and training, not to mention hundreds who have helped in application development
teams, focus groups and user acceptance testing, including new Chicago Police
Superintendent Philip J. Cline.
"All our technology tools have been
developed by members for members," McDonald says. "It isn't some vendor coming
in and saying, This is what you need."
Winning Over the Cop on the Beat
Pre-Huberman, the CPD gave
itself two black eyes when it rolled out its 1999 case reporting component of
CHRIS (Criminal History Records Information System). Developed without input
from cops on the beat, rushed to meet Y2K deadlines, "there was no buy-in and no
testing," recalls IS Director Charles Padgurskis. "It went out as a big-bang
rollout, and it just didn't work."
Chicago by the Numbers
|
The CPD is the second largest police force in the nation (after New
York City) based on number of officers
Sworn officers: 13,600
Civilian employees: 3,000
Population served: 3
million
Area covered: 228 square miles
Arrests per
day in city limits: 700
Arrests per day in surrounding
municipalities: 250
IT staff: 142
| The CHRIS data-entry screens did not follow the
logical (and familiar) order of incident reporting. It was hard to enter data,
and the data it asked for was oriented more toward bureaucratic oversight than
police work. The uproar was so bad, "it still resounds in the halls today,"
Padgurskis says. It took a year to implement angry users' change requests, which
topped 200. The CHRIS system evolved and is in use today. But new incident and
arrest reporting tools with wireless capability will replace it by the end of
2004. Patrol officers will input reports from their car notebooks, eliminating
the 24-hour turnaround to get paper incident reports online and into the
database.
The single most effective strategy in winning over users to
CLEAR has been that officers train and support the users in their own districts,
says Officer Michael Tomasiello. Tomasiello is a user liaison for the new CLEAR
automated arrest system rollout. Training takes many forms, including 20-minute
briefings during morning roll-call, streaming video and two-day offsite
training.
To minimize resistance and make training simpler, designers
made the interfaces consistent with the paper forms they replaced and mirrored
consumer shopping site designs. Online help manuals are available; wizard-style
Q&A prompts guide users through data entry; single sign-on ability gets
users into all authorized CLEAR apps, and rolling the mouse icon over record
fields or boxes triggers pop-up help boxes.
Still, with 13,600 officers,
even the most conscientious training doesn't always work for everyone. A
workflow audit revealed that one officer had nearly 100 incident reports piled
up in his PC. When asked why he hadn't routed them to his superior, he said he
just didn't know how. A half hour of one-on-one training got him on his way.
There's still resistance to change, particularly among older officers.
The average age of officers in Chicago is early 40s. That's long in the tooth
for a police force, Huberman says. But rigorous joint application development
(JAD) sessions, acceptance-testing for each CLEAR app, and a 24/7 help desk have
reduced grumbling. And, except for backup in case of system failure, alternative
systems are eliminated once CLEAR modules roll out. (For more on how the Chicago
Police and other Enterprise Value Award winners managed change resistance, see
"No Small Change.")
"It used to feel like the end of the world when we'd roll something out;
resistance was so awful," Huberman says. By contrast, he adds, "we just added a
paperless medical plan to our personnel suite, and it went live without a peep
from anyone." IS actually has a backlog of 35 small projects requested by cops
eager to leverage data in new ways.
When
the Going Gets Tough...
Copious training and the methodical JAD
method (there are months of sessions and focus groups before any coding begins)
have been a double-edged sword. While it all helps to ensure user buy-in and to
develop useful tools, it also takes time. Since CLEAR applications are
enterprisewide, it can, in fact, take more than a year and a half to train every
user. Given staffing rules and requirements, only two officers per district can
be taken offline for training at any given time.
Personnel changes slow
things down as well. Huberman wages "a constant struggle" to hold onto cops
detailed to IS. Because of resource constraints, they may be redeployed at any
time. Civilian IT staff and Oracle consultants have helped maintain consistency
on the various projects.
Another drag on the project has been the
never-ending pursuit of funds. After working with Oracle on a time and materials
basis from 1995, the department entered into a $32 million partnership with the
database giant in July 2001 (with Huberman as lead negotiator for the police).
Chicago pledged $12 million, and Oracle granted a 50 percent discount on 180,000
consulting hours and 1,000 hours of Oracle University training in exchange for
shared ownership of the intellectual property. Under contract terms, Oracle's
code is royalty-free, but Oracle can charge other clients for consulting and
customization.
| Unfinished Business |
What does the C in CLEAR stand for?
Read More
| To keep development costs down, Chicago
employed Oracle's CDM Fast Track development tool and rapid application
development methodology, using a palette of preconstructed, built-in features to
quickly deploy apps. Since user screen code is contained in the database rather
than in the client/server tier, a code change made in the database is
immediately available citywide. It took only 22 days to automate the
paper-intensive contact card system into CLEAR. It would normally take three to
four months, according to Bhatt.
But the discounted consulting hours
have now run out, and Chicago must fund future CLEAR applications on its own.
Huberman, who says he spends one-third of his time on funding-related work, is
already on the case. He's secured $10 million for post-partnership funding and
anticipates Illinois will help fund CLEAR development now that State Police are
planning to use Chicago's database as their own data repository. If necessary,
Huberman says, he will consider imposing some sort of nominal user fee on
outside agencies using Chicago's database to help pay for maintenance.
Technology challenges still to be overcome include obtaining enough
wireless bandwidth to allow mug shots (and eventually video) to be accessed from
the patrol car computers. The department is also replacing its entire network
backbone with fiber (fiber was already in place, but speeds were constrained to
less than T1). The problem has been Chicago's old infrastructure; some of the
district stations go back to the 1800s, and the wiring is not much newer. But
the oldest are being replaced by five new buildings now under construction.
Going National
Despite its slow, methodical
rollout, there's little chance that CLEAR will stall, especially given the
growing tendency of other law enforcement agencies to query and add data to it.
Susan Hartnett, research associate for Northwestern University's Institute for
Policy Research, says this extra-agency integration has been CLEAR's most
notable success. In March 2003, 175 municipalities were hooked into CLEAR. By
the fall, the number had jumped to 225. "It's growing faster than they
expected," Hartnett says.
 Deputy Superintendent Barbara McDonald says, "Crime in Chicago is
declining, and I think it will continue to decline because of our ability to be
information-driven." | In fact, Deputy
Superintendent McDonald was taken by surprise. Although she always envisioned
CLEAR as a regional crime-fighting network, not just a local one, she was
skeptical that it would catch on. "I knew it was technologically possible, but
it was an issue of law enforcement waking up to the power of
information-sharing," McDonald says.
Federal interest is growing too.
The FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Drug
Enforcement Administration are all tapping into CLEAR. Oracle, which has worked
with Chicago to demonstrate the system nationally, is seeing momentum building
around a national model. "The feds know that 90 percent of the effort will come
from cops on the street; that's where we'll solve this problem of crime
reduction and fighting terrorism," says Doug Adams, a regional vice president
for the public sector at Oracle Consulting.
Good criminal information is
good terrorist information, since many terrorists are shown to have prior
criminal histories. This would be particularly important to those policing the
nation's capital, where the hope of the Washington PD is to become a regional,
national and international information hub in the war on terror. "Information is
a weapon in fighting terrorism," says Washington Police's Graham. Monitoring and
interpreting data in advance of attacks "can only be done with access to and
delivery of reliable information," which is a key feature of CLEAR, he says.
Just think about the possible advantage of knowing that a certain car,
perhaps registered to a foreign national, was parked illegally in several
sensitive areas in the U.S. capital over a period of months.
Cops
and Their Computers
Back on the local crime-fighting scene, Huberman
and Sgt. Hoffman finish off their night patrol of the West side with a stop at
the 14th District station. The cathedral ceilinged, glass-walled lobby looks
more like a boutique hotel than a traditional pea-soup-colored, grimy-walled
government office. Every officer behind the front desk has a PC in front of him
(or her, in two cases). One enters an incident report into CLEAR as someone
tells her his problem in Spanish. Another officer is logging evidence into
Etrack, CLEAR's inventory tracking system. Back in the lockup, an officer asks
an offender to lift his shirt so that he can photograph his tattoos. Another
person sits handcuffed in an interrogation room as an officer enters his arrest
report into a laptop bolted to the table.
"When I started in '95, every
district station had only one PC," says Huberman, watching all the computer
activity.
"Man, this place has changed."
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