Dane County Sheriff’s Office Uses Digital Technology to Solve More Cases Faster and Protect Their Community

When law enforcement officers are investigating complex cases, finding connections among people, places, and events is critical. “You start to see who has mutual connections,” explains Detective Timothy Blanke of the Dane County (Wisconsin) Sheriff’s Office, Field Services Division. “Eventually you get that big, spoked wheel of different people, and usually one or two are usually the main hub of those wheels. Then you can start looking at all of the different spokes in the wheel and see who they move with and who they’re friends with – and work either in or out from there towards your main suspects.”

Two key challenges get in the way of creating these “spoked wheels.” One is the proliferation of mobile devices in criminal activity, and with them, massive storehouses of data. The other challenge, Blanke says, is the need to collaborate with fellow law enforcement agencies.

“Because we have clusters of different departments, it’s not hard for a suspect to walk across the street and all of a sudden be in a completely different city and in a completely different jurisdiction,” he says. “You need to be in constant communication with your other agencies as to who’s working on what, because it’s not tough to have two burglaries right across the street from each other but in two different towns.”

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office, located in the city of Madison, is a good example of a law enforcement agency that can benefit from inter-agency collaboration. The crisscrossing law enforcement responsibilities around the county’s 1,200 square miles make collaboration among agencies essential.

For the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, that collaboration has been strengthened by technology – specifically, investigative analytics, which investigators, analysts, and prosecutors use to share Digital Intelligence, collaborate on cases, surface leads, and build out the “spoked wheels” that help solve cases and bring criminals to justice. (Digital Intelligence is the data collected and preserved from digital sources and data types – such as smartphones, computers, and the cloud – and the process by which agencies collect, review, analyze, manage, and obtain insights from this data to run their investigations more efficiently.)

Finding Ways to Work Smarter

To improve cross-agency crime-solving, the sheriff’s office adopted Cellebrite Pathfinder. “It really revolutionized our collaboration,” Blanke says. By automating digital analysis, even for large amounts of data and complex networks of personas in crime rings, Cellebrite Pathfinder helps the sheriff’s office share what officers know with neighboring law enforcement agencies. Officers also get the benefit of applying artificial intelligence to case resolution.

“Criminals are becoming more sophisticated, and we need to be sophisticated as well, because criminals don’t respect the lines that we have to respect,’” Blanke says.

Cracking a Car-Theft Ring

The power of collaboration and analysis solutions became crystal clear when the Dane County Sheriff’s Office had to find and arrest the perpetrators of a broad car-theft ring. It’s a common practice in the Madison suburbs for commuters to warm up their cars in their driveways on frigid winter mornings – often leaving the keys in the ignition. The thieves would drive around neighborhoods in a single vehicle, jump out, check car doors to locate keys in running cars, then take off with the stolen vehicles.

“Then the thieves started getting even more bold and going into houses,” Blanke explains. “They would look for doors that were unlocked, go inside, and take the car keys. If they saw a purse or a wallet, they’d likely grab any cards out of that, and then grab the cars out of the garage.” These amped-up car and house thefts were even more worrisome, he adds, because of concerns that homeowners and thieves might end up in armed encounters.

Through traditional shoe-leather policing, Blanke and his fellow officers discovered that the thieves were parking many of the stolen cars at a local mall parking lot. “When they needed a car, they’d go grab one,” Blanke says. But catching the thieves in action still eluded the officers.

Digital Evidence Provides the Big Picture

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office added a complete digital intelligence platform to solve cases.  With these solutions in place, the timing was right to attack the car-theft problem anew, since at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the thefts started to pick up. At the same time, members of the Madison city police force, who knew some of the suspected players in the car-theft ring, started tracking the suspects’ movements on social media to obtain more names and places. And members of the sheriff’s office car-theft team were working with other law enforcement agencies in the county to gather information about car thefts.

“I started noticing that more phones were coming to me,” Blanke said. “When we recover a car that’s stolen, we’ll frequently find mobile devices left behind. We realized that the suspects’ phones are their lives. We could probably find even more data about who these people are, rather than just hope we catch them in the act next time. I thought, why not put everything into Cellebrite Pathfinder and see what we can learn?”

Officers began feeding any possible information on the theft ring into Cellebrite Pathfinder – such as social media data, data from phones found in stolen autos, and iVe data from Berla, the vehicle forensics tool. Information from Berla, such as data from a vehicle’s several dozen electronic control units, can be converted into the Cellebrite data format, and viewed through Cellebrite Pathfinder.

“From the navigation data, sometimes we’d see vehicles going to similar locations,” Blanke says. “That way, we’d know the places they might be dumping them or places they’re taking the cars for other activities.”

As officers from various agencies tracked suspects’ social media activity, the Dane County Sheriff’s Office obtained warrants for the relevant social media data, then entered that data into Cellebrite Physical Analyzer and eventually Cellebrite Pathfinder. The result was the “big, spoked wheel” of suspects and their connections to the car thefts, such as videos of suspects in the cars that they had stolen.

“We played the long game,” Blanke says. “As soon as we had files on given cars and suspects, we’d send over a set of charges.” Eventually about 70 charges were filed against suspects, although the investigations are ongoing. “We’re keeping all the files in Cellebrite Pathfinder, ready to go,” he says. “When the next round of car thefts occurs, we can feed in new data and see if it’s the same guys at work, or if we have new players.”

Working Together to Solve Broad Problems

The success of the sheriff’s office use of technology to study digital evidence is inspiring more such applications to many cases. “We need to find ways to put bad guys in jail safely and efficiently,” Blanke says. And wherever possible, he adds, that analysis will involve agencies that can benefit from the power of shared.

To see how other agencies around the world are harnessing the power of digital technology to protect and save lives, accelerate justice, and preserve data privacy click here.

About the Author: Mark Gambill oversees Cellebrite’s global marketing operations, including product marketing, advertising, promotions, analyst and public relations, field marketing, brand management and corporate events. Mark has over 20 years of executive marketing experience across a diverse set of technology sectors with concentrations in Big Data, AI, Machine Learning and Augmented Analytics.

Prior to joining Cellebrite, he served as the CMO at MicroStrategy, prior to that role, he served as the CMO for Vocus, a global provider of marketing automation software. Mark holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Florida State University and has completed graduate work at INSEAD.