Fighting Crime in the Computer Age

It is 4:30 in the morning on a bitterly cold fall day in Boston and there has just been an accident in front of the Harvard-affiliated Deaconness Hospital. A taxicab has crashed into a passenger car. The Harvard Police patrol car assigned to the Medical Area arrives at the scene and takes down the cab operator's license. While one policeman remains at the scene of the accident, the other telephones in the license number to the department's Garden Street headquarters. Within minutes, a national check on the driver's record has been performed. Police arrest Bruce Nance, 42, of Boston, on rape charges; Nance has been wanted for five years by Boston Police.

This fall Harvard took a giant step toward bringing its police force into this age of modern communications by purchasing a special computer for the Police department. After four months of starting practice, the system is fully operational and police say it is proving even more useful than they had hoped.

Among other functions the $30,000 Durango computer can:

*Analyze crime patterns in a particular area, or even building, allowing police to concentrate their force on trouble spots;

*Track the history of stolen goods. Police can pinpoint, for example, the number of bicycles of a particular make stolen from the Science Center each week since the system was installed.

*Shorten from about seven minutes to 20 seconds the time required for an identity check of a suspect. The computer identifies, dates and describes every contact the Harvard Police have recorded and can provide a printout upon request.

*Produce customized summaries of crimes for House masters, building superintendents, deans, news organizations and a variety of other groups interested in campus crime.

The nerve center of the Police Department's glossy new headquarters is the dispatch room that sits, protected by a huge pane of plate glass, in the center of the building's suite of offices.

Communications clerks sit here 24 hours a day, directing the flow of police around the University. The equipment in the room has changed little since the room was built in 1979-with one exception: a wheeled trundle, installed this summer, now brings a computer terminal within inches of the clerk's elbow.

The new computer replaces the cumbersome arrangement the department had used for several years, when data was entered at a mainframe computer at the Business School, printed out, and carried back to the police department.

"It was very difficult to work with," says Donald C. Nagle, the department's management information systems coordinator. Nagle has been a backer of computerization for years, he says, and is currently in charge of the Durango system.

"We were on a timesharing basis there [at the Business School]-our access to the system was no better than students here on course computers," he adds. And, Nagle says, the previous system was ill-suited: "It was difficult to use and expensive to make changes." Business School bills could run into hundreds of dollars for just minutes of the mainframe computers time, Nagle says. The new computer will pay for itself in three years, officials estimate.

The Durango system makes use of software designed especially for small police departments by the Illinois computer company CES Telecommunications. So far the Harvard force is the only one in the country to use this program. "This is new software specifically designed for our department," Nagle says.

CES is also working on a customization of the Harvard system for the police department in Northfield. Illinois, a town of 5000 with a police force roughly the size of Harvard's. Northfield also plans to purchase a Durango computer.

"It still has to be approved by the village Board of Trustees, but we're hoping to get it within a year," says George A. Wagner, deputy chief of Northfield Police, who has been in charge of computerizing the force. He cities the same reasons as Harvard officials for buying a computer: "We're currently using a computer in central Illinois for data analysis, and that takes months. We need our own machine for statistical data analysis."

"We're probably 20 years ahead of most departments in the country," says Captain Jack Morse, acting director of Harvard Police, about the new computer system. The system has also been invaluable in helping the department with allocating resources. Morse says, For example, a recent realignment of night-patrol officers to give the Quad more coverage, but still maintain a concentration of officers at areas with a history of criminal activity, came about because of the computer.

"We redistributed our forces somewhat, to make some areas better patrolled, but didn't sacrifice anything in the process," Morse says.

Workers seem pleased with the changes the new technology has brought. "When people come into the Police Department now they can really say. 'You guys have come a long way,'" says Communications Clerk Carl A. Tempesta, a department worker since 1978. Tempesta gestures to the $250,000 Motorola communications console he sits behind, installed in 1979, and computer by his right hand. "They say, 'Hey! This is a police department!' It makes the university campus police a professional organization," he says.

Harvard is not unique in having a police computer. Several other nearby colleges, including MIT, have systems that are similar. Both Cambridge and Boston have computerized system and are linked by direct line to the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) run by the FBI. Harvard has been on a waiting list for such a link for the past 18 months.

At MIT, Sergeant Ann Glavin, in charge of the computer system there, says police operations are "streamlined and smoother" since the installation in October of a Zenith datasystems computer.

There have been problems with computers at the Harvard department. Early in the program, backers admit, there was some opposition to computerization among the rank-and-file.

'Officers were worried about change. They were afraid that their jobs would change: they'd have to redefine their reports, redefine the information they were getting" from crime victims, Nagle says.

But now police officials are already planning additions to the computer, although they hesitate to predict a definite timetable for building it up. "This system will be dated in six or seven years. Then we'll be able to get something for half the money that can do three times as much," Nagle says.

Morse speaks more cautiously about purchasing more computer equipment. "There are certainly things we're doing manually now that we could be using automation for," he says, mentioning accounting and word-processing as examples. "But we have what we need now. We don't have a Cadillac computer, with a lot of stuff we don't need."

Because the Durango system has proved so useful, however, the department will spend around $5000 sometime in the next few months to purchase a second storage disk for the system. The first one is already full, with 20 million characters entered in slightly less than five months.

An officer enters the department's communications room. After business hours, the small room turns into a social center of sorts as guards come off duty and stop to exchange news. "Everything originates from here, without a doubt," the officer says, tapping the communications console. "You get wrong information from here, there's nothing you can do," he says. Does the computer help? "Definitely," he says, "it can give you information fast and accurately." Then he stops, looks at the screen, and adds quickly: "Of course, from there on, the officer handles it."