Ramesh Nyberg
The Criminal Justice Revolution – Were You There?
Perhaps the more appropriate title for this column should be, “Will You Be There?” because there is sure to be another one. The revolution I’m talking about occurred in the mid to late 1980s and is marked by sudden growth in the fields of forensics and computer technology. I’m lucky enough to have worked in law enforcement before this explosion and the reason I want to write about it in this issue is because I think we are poised for another one.
Here are a few scenes from police work in 1985:
My partner and I are in the car on our way to do an area canvass when my pager – a small rectangular box clipped to my belt – emits a rapid beeping tone and displays a phone number on its LCD screen. It’s the Homicide Office. There’s something they can’t, or don’t want to, say over the radio, so now we pull off the expressway and into a shopping center to find a pay phone. You see, we haven’t been given these new mobile phones which some of the supervisors and brass have. Those big Motorola jobs – nicknamed “The Brick” – can make phone calls without being wired to anything. It’s remarkable.
In another scene, I’m working on a new case at the office. I have a suspect I need to do a background check on. I’ve already given his name and DOB to our analyst who will run him through FCIC/NCIC. I’m trying to find out where he lives, so I ask her to conduct a check through the state’s new drivers’ license program which allows her to pull up a DL photo in a matter of an hour or two. Then, I’ll go down to the ID section and thumb through boxes of photos of males who look similar to the subject and put together a “six-pack” photo display to show witnesses. Before I do that, I’ll call the State Attorney’s Office and get subpoenas for BellSouth (for phone records) and Florida Power and Light to see if he has active service in his name somewhere. I’ll drive to the State Attorney’s Office, pick up the subpoenas and go the Subpeona Compliance offices of BellSouth and FPL to serve them. They should be able to get me results in two to three days. I’ll study my lead sheet first, so I can coordinate all of this driving prior to leaving. Efficient time management is important here!
Before I leave, I get a call from the crime lab – my results from the testing of the bloodstains we collected at the crime scene three days earlier are in. They will give me a blood type and hopefully a few enzyme groups to narrow it down and then we’ll need to get a blood sample from the suspect to see if they line up.
Scenario three: I just finished dictating my report on the first two weeks of the investigation. I pop the cassette out of the recorder, wrap a cover sheet around it, secure it with a rubber band, and walk it back to our steno pool. How lucky we are to have these incredible girls who put their headphones on and type up our reports with blazing speed on their IBM Selectric typewriters! Do you know that they now have white correction ribbon, so they can back up to an error and type over it and then type in the correct word? No more messy Wite-Out®. By tomorrow – unless they get really busy – I should have my report back. If there are errors, or something they feel should be changed, my sergeant or lieutenant will catch it, circle it with a red pen and give it back to me. Then, I walk it back to the steno pool for correction.
The work involved in all three of these scenarios will undergo drastic changes in the next two years. By 1987, we will all be issued cellular phones with which we can actually call each other and discuss case information without paging anyone or having to find a pay phone.
In that same year, all of the secretaries in our building will be trained in the use of desktop computers with big, heavy TV-like screens called monitors. This will streamline writing memos and reports. (It will take our department a few months to hit themselves in the head and say, “Maybe we should give those to the stenos, too, huh?”) I was fascinated by computers. My cousin worked for an advanced think tank segment of IBM and he got me an employee price on a brand-new IBM desktop computer. I started learning about software and all these other very cool things it could do. I went to work one day and wrote up a memo, explaining what a database was.
“You know,” I told my lieutenant after he read the memo, “we could keep track of case information with it. Let’s say someone’s name sounds familiar. We can run it against the records we have in our databases – street names, license plate numbers, all of that stuff.”
He looked at me funny. “We’ll think it over.”
A year later, a sergeant wrote a memo identical to mine and the brass was doing cartwheels over it. Databases are the future! Let’s do it!
It pays to have stripes.
But, back to 1987. Late in 1986, we attended a briefing put on by the Serology section of our crime lab. A new technology developed by a scientist in England was starting to be used: DNA. By mid-1987, we were no longer discussing blood enzyme groups. Now, we could get a profile from a drop of blood the size of a dime or from a substantial amount of saliva or other body fluids which could be matched with a suspect with the certainty of a fingerprint. All we had to do was package it up and send it to a lab in New York. A couple of months later, we had our result. (That was a game-changer, of course, but we now know how DNA has evolved. The dime-sized drop of blood very quickly got smaller and smaller and now we need nothing more than several skin cells to get a profile.)
Things were changing all around us. Those computers? By 1987, we could send something called an E-mail to the State Attorney’s Office, to request our subpoenas. We could do the same thing with drafts of warrant affidavits. Our stenos were now typing reports on computers and they were being saved electronically. By late 1988, our crime scene personnel were taking digital photos at crime scenes – no more 35mm film development. No more thumbing through boxes of booking photos – photo displays were being put together electronically, too. (We were just a little late to the party in most of these things; the first spacecraft to take photos of Mars was sending the photos back to NASA digitally in 1976).
In 1989, our department was visited by a company called AutoTrak. They had developed an incredible program which collected and made available massive amounts of public records. With a few keystrokes, a detective could get a background check – complete with vehicle records, address history, real estate ownership, and phone numbers for a subject in a matter of a few minutes. This phenomenal system later evolved into Experian’s TLO.
You know – and may have lived – the rest of the story. In fact, this revolution of technology in police work which suddenly made things so much faster and easier for us only accelerated. I was able to put a general box around the era in which I saw – and learned to use – so many new tools; 1986 to 1990 seemed to be that magic window. After that, I’m not sure anyone can point to a specific set of dates which stand out as a pivotal time in law enforcement technology because the advancements have become exponential and now all run together. Just as we marvel at the abilities of drones and the breadth of cyber investigations, AI has come to dazzle us – and cause plenty of concern as well.
For a “dinosaur” like me, keeping up with the speed of new technology is a challenge, but I can’t help but feel privileged to have been along for the ride. I’m glad I hand wrote reports; made phone calls from pay phones; and, as a rookie, had to memorize the streets by studying a hard copy of the city map. All of those things made me appreciate today’s remarkable advancements that much more.
Ramesh Nyberg retired from law enforcement in November 2006 after 27 years of police work. He lives in Miami and teaches criminal justice at a local high school. He also teaches regional law enforcement courses through Training Force, USA. He enjoys getting feedback from readers and can be reached at ramesh.nyberg@gmail.com. Also, Ram has recently announced his newly published book, The Ten Must-Haves to Be a Great Detective, available on Amazon in both paperback and Kindle eBook. You can find it by visiting https://tinyurl.com/hwc2xajm
