OGDEN, Utah -- Ogden police plan to combat crime in a whole new way, by developing leads by giving the public more information.
It may sound like an archaic approach but by using resident interest and arrest warrant transparency, the police department hopes to diminish crime.
Not only journalists and residents are championing for more public access to know what is going on in their neighborhood when it comes to arrest warrants. Ogden says making arrest warrants more public would also help them in a number of cases.
Ogden's police deputy director of support services, John Harvey, said giving the public more access to view arrest warrants will help cut down on crime and save money because police don't have to expend extra time seeking out those with active warrants.
"Being transparent is a good thing for solving crimes, but it also legitimizes what we say," Harvey said.
In the next few weeks Ogden police hope to go live with a cyberwatch website and "plan to be the most transparent police department in the country," Harvey said.
The website will send out emails with details of crime going on in their area to thousands of residents who want to be part of a neighborhood cyberwatch group. He said it will help residents feel empowered and build trust with the public and police.
He has been working to get the courts and the Utah Bureau of Crime Identification to allow his agency to make not only certain search warrants, but all arrest warrants public.
BCI currently has a public arrest warrant website, but it is not searchable by address and hard to find someone if you don't know the exact spelling of the person's full name, Harvey said.
"Is it to sort of satisfy the law or to empower the public?" Harvey asked, questioning the functionality of the state BCI website. "If it's public information, what do we care?"
Harvey said Ogden can do better itself -- and will.
Harvey said Ogden police receive daily data generated from the Utah Criminal Justice Information System but BCI won't allow Ogden to release the information. The data contains real-time criminal and public safety related information being generated around the state. It also provides as an online doorway to federal criminal databases.
The information that comes from UCJIS is not considered public information, because it is still sensitive information relating to investigations, according to BCI spokeswoman Chelsey Burns. Only data that is released to the courts or filed as public in court is made available on the state arrest warrant website.
The idea Harvey is suggesting isn't just a pie in the sky plan. He has 32 years of proven experience and came to work with Ogden in 2012. When he worked as an officer in Shelby County in Memphis, Tenn., in 2000 the department created a website with mugshots and charges listed for each offender with an outstanding arrest warrant. The public transparency generated a boom of tips flooding into the office and helped close out thousands of active warrants.
Harvey said criminals usually run and hide, but their neighbors seem to have a pretty good pulse on their location.
"We cleared over 10,000 warrants in one year because we put that (information) out to the public," he said.
in some cases neighbors in Shelby County would call up and inform their friend, or the individual would find out themselves online, that they had a warrant out for their arrest, (in some cases they didn't even know about) for something as simple as a failure to appear for a traffic ticket.
"People would end up turning themselves in," Harvey said of his experience in Shelby County.
There is a paradigm shift in police work nowadays, Harvey said, where things now need to be more open compared to police keeping every detail close to the vest in the past. Crimes are typically solved because someone calls the police and lets them know, Harvey said. In the case of making arrest warrants public a lot of people looking out their window and knowing what they are looking for can help solve major crimes.
Making people fill out requests to unseal warrants and get access to arrest warranta becomes an ordeal, he said.
"We are just making (the public) jump through hoops."
Harvey said repeat offenders or "urban terrorists" as he calls them have a cyclical problem of using crime, after they are released back into their neighborhood, to raise money to pay of their bondsman or lawyer for their last run-in with the law.
For Harvey, bringing active criminal warrants to the eyes of local residents is the best place for it to be.
"There is nothing better from a police perspective than a nosy neighbor."
Copyright 2014 - Standard-Examiner, Ogden, Utah
McClatchy-Tribune News Service
