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by Andrew Mobley
LITTLE ROCK (KATV) — Senator John Boozman paid a visit to the Little Rock Police Department's Real-Time Crime Center Thursday. The crime center will play a key role in the Arkansas Criminal Intelligence Network that Boozman secured federal funding for.
Law enforcement officials believe that the network, or ACIN, could increase the number of crimes solved in Arkansas by 20 percent, particularly property crimes.
ACIN is being designed as a centralized, cloud-based platform where law enforcement agencies can consolidate their data and have access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools.
"It just allows us to integrate a lot of our CAD, which is our computer-aided dispatch, or RMS report management systems, to be able to share data with one another, to make us more effective with cases. And I know many of the chiefs are going to be very supportive of this, and it's just all around probably long overdue," said Heath Helton, chief of police for the Little Rock Police Department.
This year, Boozman helped secure a one-time $5.5 million federal appropriation to get the network, or ACIN, off the ground over the next three years.
"Those dollars have been used very, very wisely… so that we have a system now that is really making a difference regarding crime in the community," Boozman said Thursday.
Until now, law enforcement agencies in Arkansas have had disconnected databases broken up by jurisdiction… and that delays information sharing and crime solving.
"People go, well, you know, why don't the police talk to one another? Well, they do. But when there's thousands of cases, to get down to the minute details, that's where technology and some of this machine learning can help us," said Casey Clark, chief of investigations at the Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney's Office.
Clark, the executive director of ACIN and the driving force behind its development, says it would be powered by artificial intelligence that could analyze crime data quicker than any human.
"It's not making arrest decisions or anything else. But it's sifting through that fine data to find those strings that connect case to case. What ACIN is going to enable investigators to do is go, 'car break-in, red Honda,' and it will search all the incidents in the state and it'll come back and go, 'We have 10 incidents with matches that had a suspect vehicle that was a red Honda Accord.' That is powerful, because to do something like that now would take literally weeks, months," Clark told KATV.
So it's exciting. It's exciting for everyone in law enforcement."
ACIN is expected to launch early next year.
The network will eventually include 43 police departments in Arkansas' largest cities, many of which have already signed memorandums of understanding.
ACIN will also be accessible to law enforcement agencies in the rest of the state.
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