California Police Chief- Fall 2013 CPCA_2018_Winter Magazine-FINAL | Page 17

The results have been remarkable. In the subsequent
five-year period, shootings in Oakland have dropped
a stunning 50 percent. In this one-time murder capital
of California, homicides have declined by 42 percent,
with robberies dropping by 38 percent. For those who
might think that such a decline in violent crime would be
attended by more aggressive policing, perhaps the most
remarkable statistic is a 74 percent reduction in police use
of force in the same time period.
DECREASE IN
SHOOTINGS
DROP IN
HOMICIDES
DECLINE IN
ROBBERIES
REDUCTION IN
POLICE USE
OF FORCE
“Forensic Logic is the most powerful technology
for reducing violent crime in America today,” says Eric
Breshears, former Deputy Chief of Field Operations at
Oakland PD, who oversaw the system’s deployment at
the agency. “Every law enforcement success in Oakland
was the result of an initiative, and every initiative has been
rooted in Forensic Logic. The city would be a very different
place today without it.”
“Forensic Logic is the most powerful
technology for reducing violent crime in
America today.”
-Deputy Chief (ret), Eric Breshears
At its core, the Forensic Logic system is a search engine
that has been built and optimized for law enforcement.
While search engines are ubiquitous in modern life for
their ability to quickly present meaningful information
from a universe of data, traditional search technologies
perform poorly in the law enforcement industry since
agency data is spread among so many different systems
and document types, all with different formats and levels
of data structuring.
Forensic Logic developed a process to normalize the
disparate universe of law enforcement data types from
incident reports to dispatch calls and countless others, and
then train and perfect its ranking algorithms through years
of historical user activity. From millions of annual searches,
the platform “learns” to better understand what a user is
looking for, and the result is a system that allows police to
glean insights on criminal activity with the same ease as a
Google search.
Cutting crime rates is only half the story. Allowing
Oakland PD to do so while reducing overall police
footprint in the community has earned the heaviest praise
from Forensic Logic’s users. “The failure of so many
analytical or predictive technologies out there is that they
all tell you to do the same thing: send more cops into high
crime neighborhoods,” says Captain Chris Bolton, who
as Commander of OPD’s Office of the Inspector General
helped craft policies and procedures to minimize negative
impact upon the community. “The problem is that with
more officers looking for violations, you have a lot of
arrests for the kinds of low-level crimes that aren’t really
affecting those neighborhoods. It’s not a recipe for a good
relationship with the community.”
Bolton continues, “Forensic Logic allowed us to do
what we didn’t think would be possible, reducing crime
while also reducing our policing footprint. It all comes back
to the system’s ability to help us quickly identify the very
small percentage of criminals doing the most harm in a
community.”
“Forensic Logic allowed us to do what
we didn’t think would be possible, reducing
crime while also reducing our policing
footprint.”
-Captain Chris Bolton
“We started out with this simple idea, that giving law
enforcement better access to information would lead to
better decisions and better outcomes,” said Brad Davis,
CEO of Forensic Logic. “We never could have imagined
how far the Oakland law enforcement community would
advance that idea, and the successes they would achieve
for police and for their neighborhoods.”
Forensic Logic’s has developed into a nationwide
search engine and information network for law
enforcement. In late 2017 the company acquired the law
enforcement information giant COPLINK from IBM and
simultaneously partnered with the global information firm
Thomson Reuters. The purpose of both transactions, says
Davis, is to expand its customer base, data footprint, and
product offerings. “Our mission is to help deliver the same
outcomes we’ve seen in Oakland to as many communities
as we possibly can.” ■
www.forensiclogic.com
WINTER 2018 | California Police Chief
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