Fighting Crime With Science

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31083, 11 June 1966, Page 5

Fighting Crime With Science

(By MARGARET JONES in the “Sydney Morning Herald.”)

A DETECTIVE types on a punch card: “Don’t call the cops for 10 minutes after I leave” and feeds the card into a computer. Within seconds the computer nimbly produces a list of known criminals who have used the phrase on an armed robbery. A patrol car stationed at a bridge radios a licence number to another computer at police headquarters. By the time the “screened” automobile has reached the other side of the rive?, the information has been flashed that the driver is wanted for a traffic violation. When this system was demonstrated in New York, the first victim netted was a public relation man’s dream —a statuesque blonde in a halter top and brief shorts, who was arrested and carried off to a traffic court before an audience of 200 reporters and photographers, as well as the police commissioner and his top brass. “It should happen to your mother!” she said bitterly. Helicopters The skies over big American cities are restless with prowling police helicopters: suburban children venturing on skates on to ponds where the ice is too thin. Hear stentorian voices, like Yahweh’s, warning them from on high: the course of a stolen car screeching, through narrow streets after a bank holdup is charted from the air. The computers, the two-way radio, the helicopters are the latest weapons in the intensive war on crime in the streets being waged in major United States cities. The old

cliche that the “cop on the beat” is still the best method of law enforcement is being abandoned for the latest available scientific methods. Even lessons learned during the war in Vietnam are being turned to account Police have borrowed the idea of “tactical mobile forces” like self-contained guerrilla units which can be instantly deployed to trouble areas. War Footing If police departments all over America are putting themselves on a war-time footing, it is because the situation calls for desperate remedies. Crime in the streets has become a national cancer, spreading through the whole body of the State. The United States has become, in fact, the world’s most criminal nation. On a per capita basis, Americans commit twice as many assaults as the French, three times as many rapes as the Italians, and five times as many murders as Englishmen. In his last message to Congress, President Johnson spoke of the “crime which marks the lives of every American—a forcible rape every 26 minutes, a robbery every five minutes, an agg: ■'vated assault every three minutes, a car theft every minute, a burglary every 28 seconds.” At the President’s bidding, Congress has passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act, under which the Justice Department will give grants to States and regions for research and development projects aimed at reducing the crime rate. The grant for this financial year is only £7 million but is likely to be sharply stepped up. Modern Weapons This sort of financial assistance will help in the rapid trend towards automation now taking place in police departments all over the country. Not so long ago, the only weapons of the policeman on the beat were his pistol and nightstick and the

handcuffs dangling at his belt. He was not even as well armed as the nervous women in the crime-infested cities who equip themselves with tear-gas “pens” and batteryrun electric cattle prodders to fight off molesters. Now the man on the beat, if he is not in a patrol car, will probably be riding a motorscooter, or even an old-style bicycle equipped with newstyle two-way radio. The motor-scooter police, who wear white crash helmets are being tried out in New York’s lethal parks, where muggers lurk in every bosky grove. Until now, the parks have been patrolled by mounted police, who were pheno-, menally decorative, but had little effect on the crime rate. The use of scooters is a shrewd psychological move. Young hoods mock at a man on horseback, but they understand the hurtling roar of a motor-scooter, and the menace of a pursuing figure bent ove r its handlebars. Some of the scooters are equipped with two-way radios, which are rapidly becoming the most übiquitous weapon in the whole of the police armoury. Patrol cars use them, and so do the men on foot. The police do not wear them as wrist watches, but carry them slung on straps over their shoulders, like a tourist’s camera. Computers Computers, however, are the real heroes of the back-room boys of the law-enforcement agencies. At the moment, the computers are more or less isolated in their respective city police departments, but the police and the F. 8.1. are planning a nation-wide linkup. The more optomistic planners hope that this link-up will be working by next year. Certainly state-wide systems should be in full operation by then. The most obvious use for a nation-wide computer network is in the art of finger-printing. Yet this is also the trickiest. The F. 8.1. in Washington gets 23,000 sets of prints every day for identification out of the

millions it has on file. By the time its human checkers come up with the answer, the wanted man may be hundreds of miles away. Electronic brains are not quite accurate enough, yet, to pick one print out of millions, but a break-through is expected within a year or two. New York State says all its fingerprint files will be computerised within 16 months; police in Detroit are using their computer to store information on the so-called “mo” (modus operand!) of criminals. When a crime is committed, a few strategic clues fed into the computer result in the rapid assembly of a list of likely names. Model Chicago Working on the assumption that criminals tend to speak in cliches, Los Angeles police ask hold-up victims to remember the exact words used by their attacker. These are fed into the computer, which matches them up with similar phrases or their synonyms, and feeds back extracts from relevant dossiers. In Chicago—a city whose name used to be itself a synonym for crime, but which is now becoming a model for law - enforcement agencies everywhere—an obedient computer has stored away the names and records of 90,000 persons and vehicles, and patrolmen, using phone or radio, tap its memory 1400 times a day. The man on the beat can find out within two minutes if the suspect he is trailing is wanted for murder or merely for a traffic violation, whether he is likely to be armed, or may resist arrest. Given a little more time, the computer will match up aliases to a criminal’s real name—or vice versa. (It also spells phonetically, and can supply an alias from a physical description.) Electronic listening devices have become a sort of a national joke, now that any jealous husband can buy a “bug” from $2O upwards, but the police find them useful. Police in Mount Vernon, New

York, recently admitted that 90 per cent of their arrests for gambling operations were made with the help of “bugs.” Losing Battle “Bugs” are out of date almost as soon as they are invented, but the current ultimate achievement in listening devices is the “shot-gun microphone,” built in the shape of a small rifle; It will pick out a group of voices in a crowded area up to 200 feet away, and can be used in or out of doors. This rules out even a lonely heath as a meeting place for conspirators: a distant, stunted bush may hide a listening policeman. On the national front, the war against crime is still a losing battle. Over-all figures rose 5 per cent last year on an already staggeringly high total. / But a small number of cities doing pioneer work in automating and computerising their inadequate forces have shown some surprising results. On the last available figures, crime was decreasing in Chicago, Cincinatti, Oklahoma City, Rochester, and Atlanta, Georgia, with Chicago leading the way. Its 1965 crime figures were actually down 15 per cent on the rates fof 1964. Law-enforcement officials say mechanisation is necessary, both because it gets results and because sheer lack on manpower is driving police departments all over the country to “try anything” measures. Low pay, long hours, and the increasing danger of a policeman's lot are keeping potential recruits away, and causing more than a few resignations.