If you had to request certain police data -- say, drunken-driving reports -- wouldn't you think a law enforcement agency would have that information at its fingertips? A simple push of a button, you might believe, would lead to reams of data -- easily accessible, easily sortable, infinitely pliable. It should automatically track crime trends, make the unobvious obvious, allow police leadership clear insight about where to put increasingly squeezed resources.
That's what it should do. From what I can tell, it doesn't, at least not very effectively.
It's interesting the kind of frustrating, Stone Age recordkeeping you can run into when investigating a large, multi-layered issue like drunken driving.
In today's paper you'll see an insert, "Laura's Legacy: The Road to MADD." More than a year's worth of work went into detailing the birth, successes and failures of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, a national organization born, partly, out of a crash that happened in Frederick County 30 years ago this week.
Much of the computer digging we had to do would have gone quicker if it weren't for how police agencies in the county and state keep records.
I've described the Maryland Public Information Act before, the tool that we use frequently to dislodge information from local and state government. For the MADD project, our computer-assisted reporter, Megan Eckstein, filed two such PIA requests: one to the Maryland State Police, the other to the Frederick County Sheriff's Office.
In short, and oversimplifying somewhat, she asked for records of DUI and DWI arrests, and drunken-driving crashes. Her request to the state police went back 10 years; she asked the sheriff's office for records from 2005 to now.
Nothing too complicated there, believe me.
The sheriff's office responded by asking us to pay $8,744 for 45 days of "researching by hand."
"The Sheriff's Office does not have in place any type of computer program that would allow us to pull such information for you," their response letter stated.
But they did offer to create a program to capture the information -- a mere $1,715.
The state police response was cheaper, but even more bizarre: $6,972 total. That's for 238 hours of staff time searching, and 75 cents a sheet for 1,360 pages.
According to the state police, records are kept not in electronic format, but on microfilm.
Yes, microfilm. The stuff spies used in the 1950s.
Essentially, if you want any information, the Maryland State Police has to search those records by hand.
That, to me, is jaw-dropping. Not hardly the cutting-edge crime enforcement technology I expected. Something as high-profile as information about drunken driving, for example, you would think would be readily and easily accessible.
Since 2005, local police -- Frederick , Thurmont , Brunswick and the county -- have been using a system called I-LEADS, created by Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., to store and track information. Apparently, it's frustrating technology.
The county sheriff's office employs crime analysts whose sole job it is to look for trends in data. But if they don't think to write a program for a specific type of crime, or if they write the program the wrong way, then there would be no way for others to see the trend except anecdotally.
You see, the type of programming language the system uses, SQL, requires precision -- put in the wrong search parameters, and you can leave out whole segments of data.
Reliability seems to be a big question mark here.
It makes it complicated enough when the public want to see certain data. So, what if the agencies themselves want to look for it?
One officer Eckstein talked to said he turned to paper records in one case, rather than fight with the I-LEADS system.
When someone claimed excessive force was being used against the elderly, the office went through each paper record looking for dates of birth. He pulled ones only before a certain date. In the end the officer had fewer than 10 records, but said it was easier for him to do it by hand than get someone to find the information on the data system for him.
I don't know about you, but that seems to me like a huge waste of taxpayers' money, not to mention police time.
Cliff Cumber is an assistant city editor at The Frederick News-Post. Frederick Watchdog can be contacted by e-mailing watchdog@newspost.com or following on Twitter at twitter.com/FNPwatchdog.
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