Edmonton-area joint police forces operation mines data gold, 1,000 arrested

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With a new data-driven approach, the RCMP, Edmonton Police Service and Alberta Sheriffs together recently rounded up 1,000 “most wanted” suspects from around Edmonton and the surrounding area in a 10-day window.

At a news conference Friday, leaders from the three agencies described making a list and checking it twice, with an RCMP-led joint forces operation targeting the top 10,000 suspects — and arresting 1,000 of them between Oct. 8 and Oct. 18.

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The RCMP has been using data to rank offenders for two years; collaborating with other agencies through an agreement forged with the Alberta Association of Chiefs of Police, “that’s what is making this a real game changer,” said RCMP Supt. Mike McCauley.

“While we’ve always collaborated as policing partners, we realized that each police agency in Alberta were ranking their priority offenders in different ways, based on the harm they were causing in their specific venues,” McCauley said.

The data was collated through the Alberta RCMP’s strategic analysis and research unit and the EPS business analytics, intelligence and reporting section, scored through the uniform Crime Severity Index, with the team quickly sifting through the data to prioritize who to go after first.

“We are now able to collect and translate and disseminate the offender data of all police agencies. With this information, we have ranked each of the 85,000 unique offenders, based on the amount of harm they caused provincewide,” McCauley said.

CRIME-FIGHTING WITH DATA

Integrated offender management? There’s an app for that, and digging through shuffled reams of paper files is a thing of the past.

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Crunching the numbers in the digital era is more about merging spreadsheet columns, and that can lead to some new priorities.

Offences ranged from petty theft up the ladder of severity to arson, drug trafficking, robbery, sexual assault, and attempted murder.

They arrested 999 unique offenders provincewide, resulting in the execution of 1,072 warrants covering 2,259 charges.

Two per cent of the warrants involved a sexual assault as the most serious offence in the warrant mix.

Some 13 per cent of the warrants executed involved an assault charge (but not sex assault) as the most serious offence.

About 64 per cent of the warrants related to a Criminal Code offence, while 30 per cent were related to a Traffic Safety Act offence.

Some 45 offenders had accrued two warrants each with 90 warrants including 226 charges, and nine offenders had three warrants each with 27 warrants spanning 76 charges.

One property crime offender had a total of six warrants including 26 charges.

Another property crime offender had six warrants with 14 charges, including assaulting a police officer with a weapon.

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One suspect was ranked 852nd most wanted based on his CSI score. Turns out he was linked to crimes in three different RCMP jurisdictions as well as in the City of Edmonton.

When analyzing this person’s crimes in each individual jurisdiction, he wouldn’t have been at the top of any single detachment’s list, however, by combining the data from across Alberta, the real impact this individual was having on Albertans was revealed.

Supt. Keith Johnson of EPS’s crime suppression and community operations hailed the impact of the joint effort.

“The communication lines we have between the agencies has improved so much due to the digital era. So we’re able to match our response with the mobility of these offenders,” he said.

“This joint forces operation has proven that collecting, translating, and sharing offender data with our law enforcement partners proves to be an effective way to apprehend some of the province’s most notorious offenders.”

WORKING SMARTER, SAFER

Working smarter means working safer, important when an arrest can means life or death for the officer on the call.

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“The important thing is that we do take the data, we prioritize it, we work together to come up with a proper plan, because these are really very high-risk individuals, so officer safety and public safety has to be taken into account,” Johnson said.

Alberta Sheriffs Insp. Chip Sawchuk said the effort was the first formal operation done together with the RCMP.

“Our teams have been going out and working in RCMP jurisdiction since February, but this is the first formal joint force of operation, and from our perspective, it went very well,” said Sawchuk.

The RCMP’s McCauley agreed.

“We’re happy to have sheriffs on board as another partner for initiatives like this,” McCauley said.

“At the end of the day, all of our agencies always work well together. This unique approach has been the kind of big-data approach where we’re taking data and translating it into workable data so that we can prioritize,” he said.

Look out, Calgary offenders — in the coming weeks, the RCMP and Alberta Sheriffs will be teaming up with the Calgary Police Service for a similar operation.

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