Kay Fate reports:
The smartphones Rochester Police officers carry are about to get a whole lot smarter.
For Tim Heroff, captain of the services division, it also means his officers will be a whole lot safer.
The department has been using an IBM-created investigative software called Identity Insight, or i2, for a little more than a year “to help us understand the non-obvious relationship associations” between people they encounter on a relatively regular basis.
More useful data
Most record management systems have the ability to tell officers who’s been directly associated with a vehicle; the i2, Heroff explained, “takes that out to several degrees of separation.
“That’s what sets us apart from others,” he said. “It’s easy to keep track of who’s associated with that vehicle, but when you add that next layer or two on, it’s possible to see other associations.
“If we can map those connections, those associations, out a few layers, all of a sudden it makes sense that this guy would be out in that car” during any given crime, because he’s linked with someone who’s been linked with that vehicle in the past.
Heroff isn’t aware of any other agencies in the country using it, but the department’s programmers took it a step further.
“We actually wrote an Android app in-house that interfaced with the Identity Insight analytics,” Heroff said.
Read more on Post Bulletin.
Thanks to Joe Cadillic for this link.