Dear Bullethead:
What are your thoughts regarding old-school policing vs. new-school policing—pros and cons of each? How can each still be applied in today’s sophisticated world? —Kelly O., via Facebook
Things are crazy these days. I see the guys get a partial plate and the color of a vehicle and inside of two minutes they know the owner’s grandparents’ names, along with every address their whole extended family has ever used. When the patrol dogs think some clown is lying to them about their name, they just slap their thumb on one of those little phone things and in a few minutes they get the dude’s name and picture. We used to have to play the name game for hours. Hell, we had a whole class in the academy about figuring out people’s names.
At the same time, knowing all of that information doesn’t mean you can do anything with it—or even be in a position where the technology gets the opportunity to help.
Just the other day a couple of my guys were looking for a murder suspect. This lady has a 30-year history as a con-artist and an identity thief. The guys put out a nationwide bulletin on her car and plate; they tapped the license plate reader systems for our county and the five surrounding counties; they used every computer trick they could come up with to find any sort of trail. They went to check an old address in a neighboring county and found it empty. The part of the computer hunt that got them something was a hit off the food stamp system on one of her identities. She had cashed in a bunch at a store near the old address. The guys collected the video from that store for later analysis, but had pretty much run into a dead end. They were planning on a long fugitive investigation looking for this scumbag and all of her many names.
While they were driving back to the city, they were joking about just being in the area where they had reason to believe she had been recently. Next thing they know, the murder suspect comes rolling down the street and pulls into a fast-food joint right in front of them. They interviewed the lady and she said she knew she was wanted and was doing things to actively hide.
My point: The guys had a computer net wide enough and deep enough to find a dangling thread on a dress blue uniform (even after Ol’ Bullethead does an inspection!) and what it took to catch her was just good old-fashioned, heads-up police work: Be in a high probability area and look for the crook.
You can apply this same frame of reference to any of the new technologies with their corresponding old-school counterparts. DNA puts a crook at the scene and you’ll probably get a conviction—unless there were a bunch of people at the scene, and we all know that happens plenty often. Have an old-school cop get a good interview on the suspect, the suspect’s friends and any other witnesses, and now your DNA evidence has some context and you will absolutely get a conviction.
Another example: Do some crime mapping and statistical models to determine a group of likely suspects for a series of burglaries. That stuff is great but all it does is allow some smart cops to put themselves in the right place at the right time to actually catch the bad guys in the act. We all know how hard it is to catch them in the act, so we use the technology to find targets, check the targets and find them with the stolen goods.
Our less-lethal options went from fists to sticks to mace to OC to bean bag shotguns to Tasers. We went from shirts to vests to full SWAT gear to armored vehicles. We went from witnesses to fingerprints to wire taps to DNA. These tools don’t really matter except to make us safer and more effective. No matter how advanced technology gets, at the end of the day, police work will always be about boots on the ground. The beauty of the technology is hard-working cops can use it to make us more effective and safer.
There’s no room for technology without cops who know what to do with it. There’s also no room for cops who don’t embrace new and effective technology as it comes along. We still need gravel-voiced, hard-nose cops who like to find and arrest as many crooks as possible—and we need those same cops to embrace technology as it evolves.
