Investigative Leads Development - Major Case function
The Town and City of Poughkeepsie police departments had a terrible serial killer case going in the early 2000s that eventually resulted in the arrest of a Town man for eight homicides. During the two year investigation, we set up a Task Force comprised of both of the above police departments and the New York State Police that worked tirelessly to try to end the mystery of women disappearing from all over town, never to be seen again.
You can imagine the load of case leads this investigation encompassed. We were aided in that case by a Major Case program the State Police had, which was used in the Task Force's downtown office after we got it set up. The proprietary system was helpful in keeping track of the caseload of all the members of the Task Force and watching for recurring names.
This case and one other in particular, a multi-year missing person case that is still ongoing, got me thinking about the nature of and need for lead development and coordination. Arising out of that came PolicePro Major Case, which started out as a separate entity but over time has been merged into PolicePro itself under the Leads area. Writing it, we used the same methodology we use across PolicePro to make it easy to use and figure out.
When PolicePro 8 came along, one of the big changes was adding a lot of new function and ability to Leads, bringing it up to a new level that really gives the cops a lift in keeping track of difficult cases.
Leads tracking starts at the Cases screen, the jumping off point for detective investigations. All the normal information from the Dispatch ticket is there, but with some additional fields for detective or investigative personnel assigned, crime scene documentation, and case closure information. The Leads screen takes it from there with a sorted list of all open leads on the individual case. An investigator or supervisor can quickly review any open case here by scrolling the list to get a general feel for the direction the case is taking and where it may stand currently.
Looking at any given lead record reveals the detail of the lead and its status - whether it is still open or closed. Most importantly, it lists all persons involved in the case, and lets the detective assign any person or persons to that lead. Once assigned, any person can be searched against and cross checked against any other leads or involvement, either in the case being investigated or across the entire system.
What you get, therefore, is the ability to search out any name via the usual Master Name search function, but then the ability to see not only what cases that person has been involved in, but what the specific context of any involvement was within the Leads function... and who they may have crossed paths with during a case's progression. Spending a little time on a Leads search in a case involving a hundred interviews may tell you that Sarah Knox is not only the HR manager at the company where the robbery took place, but is also the ex-girlfriend of one of the suspects and - amazingly enough - showed up in a review of ATM videos supplied by a bank down the street. What's your next lead going to be?
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