The Sherburne County Sheriff’s Dept. has become an important hub for fighting crime in the state’s wheel of justice as they recently officially announced the full operation of their new, state-of-the-art Intelligence Center (IC) at the Sherburne County Gov’t Center.

The Intelligence Center will bring together new crime fighting technology for investigators here in Sherburne County and across the state and union.

Reporters were given a tour of the new facility, housed in the intelligence unit’s wing at the Sheriff’s Office building. Large monitors set up on a wall displayed rows of cell phone record mapping, TV news broadcasts, theft investigation trackers  and a map of the county connecting cases with other jurisdictions statewide, county-wide and throughout the country.

Set up in the IC are 12 workstations, a hub room for analysts and a small conference room for meetings. William Jones and Chastity Tholl are the Criminal Intelligence Analysts and the workstations are for aligned departments looking to solve crimes across the state.

The center is a real-time crime analysis and data sharing hub that can connect officers and investigators with information that previously might take days or weeks to get. It’s modeled after an intelligence center in Hennepin County that started as a way to connect all of the cities within the county and expanded to become a multi-county crime analysis network.

The IC has been 10 years in the making and the response from other departments and organizations is one of complete satisfaction. Sheriff Joel Brott is excited to see the successes of the program already.

“No agency that we’ve talked to join us has turned us down,” said Brott. “It’s very unique and there’s really nothing like it anywhere in the state.”

“We spent a lot of time analyzing the U.S. to get this system up and running,” said Jones. For about a year and a half I visited other agencies and asked them what kind of tools are needed. With that information and these tools, we now have a state-of-the-art center. This will likely be a model for others.”

Brott says he and his analysts continually invite surrounding jurisdictions to join what is called RCTAG. Those jurisdictions include St. Cloud, Stearns, Mille Lacs and Benton counties and cities such as Big Lake, Becker and Princeton. RCTAG means Regional Criminal Tracking and Analysis Group.

The cost of the intelligence center was included in the budget for the expansion of the government center a few years back. The cost of that expansion and renovation was deemed  to be around $61 million. Brott said the Intelligence Center and the technology will be paid for with jail revenue. He doesn’t intend to ask participating agencies to pay to join RCTAG and utilize the space and technology.

“Currently there is no cost to the agencies who utilize the center,” he said. “It is for research and info sharing of cases.”

Jones and Tholl, the two criminal intelligence analysts and investigator for Sherburne County meet once a month with the other RCTAG members and continually update a secure website that sends out crime trend reports, suspect “work-ups” and officer safety alerts.

In the IC, information that used to take days to get from one department to a neighboring department can be shared instantly, opening new lines of communication between departments that might not have spoken with each other on a regular basis.

Other agencies in the program will sometimes send people from their departments to Sherburne County once a week to gather information and use the capabilities of the system to piece their cases together. 

Collaboration and information-sharing has always been key to any effective law enforcement effort. But in the past, crimes committed outside jurisdictions could sometimes take days, weeks and months to build cases and usually they were based on that particular departments efforts. Today, with the new IC, investigators can input a case or a particular crime and with the computer’s help, start linking evidence and suspects from other area jurisdictions or even other states.

The Sherburne County IC uses several programs to build cases and retrieve information. One of their tools is the Accurint Virtual Crime Center (AVCC) owned by LexisNexis. It’s a next generation analytics and data sharing platform with cutting-edge analytics and data linking. Through the program, law enforcement personnel can get a comprehensive view of peoples’ identities and can allow them to better target investigations, generate leads and solve crimes.

Another program within the system is CellHawk, owned by Hawk Analytics, Inc. This program gives law enforcement cellular phone record mapping and helps to connect and uncover trends. It can upload multi-format call detail records, receive live ping alerts, display device movement, map cell site locations, establish patterns, load & analyze data and share data in a report.

Cell Hawk is used primarily by Jones and Tholl.

LeadsOnline is another program essential to the IC as it provides access to transactions from thousands of reporting businesses, flags suspicious keywords and phrases found in suspect and witness statements and locate potentially stolen merchandise.

Another tool, IBM Analyst’s Notebook, turns overwhelming and disparate data from multiple sources into actionable intelligence.