by Angela Guess
Alex Olesker of CTO Vision reports, “Traffic citations are critical for funding police departments, courts, and municipalities. Unpaid citations or missed court appearances result in warrants and additional fees, but finding or arresting fugitives and collecting unpaid fines is difficult as well as time and manpower intensive. As a result, the process often stops there. In Texas alone, there is almost $1 billion in outstanding warrants, with $300 million in Houston and $100 million in Dallas. StreetCred Software is a Big Data solution designed by two Texas police officers, one a technology industry veteran who later joined the force to cut down on that backlog by collecting and analyzing all available information to optimize and manage the entire warrant lifecycle. When tested over a year within a Texas police department, StreetCred helped warrant officers increase their successful contacts by more than threefold while decreasing costs per contact by nearly three quarters.”
Olesker continues, “A good misdemeanor warrant officer will spend days planning routes, printing maps and photos, checking addresses, doing paperwork, and other research and preparation before he or she can actually go out and make contacts and arrests. As a result, in smaller agencies, the warrant officer will typically only spend one to two days per week in the field, during which he or she can expect to make five to seven good contacts where they speak with or confirm the address of a… StreetCred Software uses Big Data analysis techniques to automate these procedures and hunches. The software aggregates court, police, and law enforcement database records together with open source and other information. It alerts officers of potentially dangerous fugitives by correlating misdemeanor data with felony and violent history data from sources traditionally unavailable to warrant officers.”
photo credit: StreetCred
