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RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NC – RTI International hosted 50 law enforcement officials and crime analysts at the North Carolina Crime Analysis Symposium. The symposium provided attendees an opportunity to network and collaborate on ideas that can improve the quality of policing throughout North and South Carolina.
“We conduct a lot of research on ways to improve the field of policing and in the process work closely with many law enforcement agencies around the country,” said Kevin Strom, Ph.D., director of the policing research program at RTI. “For this symposium, we saw an opportunity to connect law enforcement agencies to share ideas and strategies so that together we can identify ways to move the field of policing forward with a focus on research, data analysis, and technology.”
The attendees represented law enforcement agencies from 17 agencies in North Carolina and one in South Carolina from the local, county and state level. The 17 North Carolina agencies serve jurisdictions that account for 25 percent of the state’s population.
“Law enforcement in the United States is at a critical juncture, and we must work collaboratively to overcome many of the challenges faced by modern policing,” said Edward Story, executive vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary at RTI during his opening remarks.
During the symposium, the Durham Police Department described how it used the RTI-designed CFS Analytics to monitor its call for service data so it can better align resources. The Fayetteville Police Department described its Real Time Crime Center, which co-locates crime analysts, intelligence analysts, and police officers and provides them with cutting edge technology to combat crime in real-time.
The Raleigh Police Department presented about how it was transitioning its data to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). This topic is of importance to agencies throughout the state as the Federal Bureau of Investigation has announced the sunsetting of the Summary Uniform Crime Reporting System. NIBRS collects more detailed crime information than the Summary system and RTI is playing a key role in the National Crime Statistics Exchange (NCS-X) Initiative, the first step in this transition.
RTI researchers also demoed its Traffic Stop Analysis tool, RTI-Star that allows law enforcement agencies to determine if there is racial bias in their traffic stops.
“All presentations were very interesting and relevant to what we do as analysts,” said one of the attendees. “Everything presented is a program or practice we could use or apply at our agency. Please do more of these.”
RTI plans to continue to host events geared toward successful collaboration with law enforcement practitioners in the future.
