Byte Out of Crime
February 15, 2005
Article
courtesy of Pulse 24
It’s called PowerCase and it’s already helped
solve one of Toronto’s most famous crimes.
The new computer system Queen’s Park has now made mandatory
for police forces throughout Ontario helped bring Holly Jones’
killer to justice.
It’s made by Xanalys, a Massachusetts company that
spent years coming up with a tool that could take all the
subtle clues from a crime scene and help detectives see some
common bonds among a chaotic picture.
"Traditionally you’d have a law enforcement officer
that’s pursuing a case and they’re collecting
their information in regard to this crime scene, and they’ve
written everything down on their note pad, they come back
and they start filling up a box with their notes,” the
company’s Cory Brown tells Pulse24.com.
“And what becomes difficult is when you want to start
doing something with that data that you’ve compiled
… and you’re thinking, did I come across that
name once before or not?' You may end up forgetting about
it. Because there’s no way you’re going to be
able to retain all the information that you’re capturing,
if you’re doing it in a manual paper format.”
Instead, the software will take all those subtle clues and
combine it to lead police in a direction they may not have
thought about.
It lets them search for similar sounding names, clues, places
and homonyms that can be the difference between finding a
killer and missing the obvious.
That’s what happened in the Jones case. "There
was something recovered from the river,” recalls spokesman
John Fitzsimmons. “They interviewed about 300 people.
And there were about 15 or 20 officers canvassing the neighbourhood
…
"All the information was inputed to the software. And
it allowed them go from a suspect list of 75 people who were
potentially in the neighbourhood … and they narrowed
it down to the folks who were the most likely targets.
“Three people mentioned the name of someone, and they
spelled it differently in each lead. And they eventually came
down to say ... let’s go find this person, and they
went around and they found him shortly afterwards.”
Michael Briere has since confessed to the crime and is serving
a life sentence.
PowerCase is also being used by the Illinois State Police,
and the company hopes to sell it to Vancouver’s force,
pending the fallout from the Robert Picton serial murder case.
They believe if their software had been on the case, the
patterns that led to more than 50 prostitutes disappearing
in the area would have been noticed sooner.
“It’s easy to get into tunnel vision when someone
meets one of the descriptions in a tip,” explains Brown.
“And you basically wind up excluding information that
could be very relevant …
"And so PowerCase becomes an equalizer in making sure
it’s easier to capture all the information.
“It’s called Link Analysis. It’s a term
that allows you to paint a picture on your screen. So having
this to visualize this information also gives you that ability
to get a different look at the case.”
And as of January 1st in Ontario, that picture is a lot clearer.
|
