Portland State Magazine Winter 2012

CRlfY1E B~ THE NLJfY18ERS Professor Kris Henning is helping Portland Police crack cases by targeting the most dangerous offenders through reliable new databases. WRITTEN BY MELISSA STEINEGER PHOTO BY KELLY JAMES WITH ON LY so many police officers and so much jail space, it makes sense to focus on catching and putting away the really bad guys. But how do you know which ones they are? Kris Henning, professor of criminology and criminal justice, devised a checklist that the Portland Police Bureau uses to predict who is most likely to commit another act of domestic violence-abusive physical, emotional, or psychological behavior aimed at controlling an intimate partner. Based on police data, Henning identified eight variables that indicate whether someone is likely to be rearrested for committing an act of domestic violence. Factors include such things as how old someone was when first arrested and the total number of times an individual has been arrested. He scored the results, giving some variables more significance than others, and together, he and Portland Police automated the entire process. One officer, says Sgt. Stewart, recently used the system to link seven additional burglaries in east Portland to a single suspect. "Rather than going from crime scene to crime scene," and solving cases after they have occurred, says Henning, "you're focusing on the offenders to prevent crimes from occurring in the first place. It's a better use of resources." Decision-making in law enforcement, according to Hen– ning, is often based on personal opinion or doing things the way they've always been done. But that can create a system that is sometimes ineffective or, at worst, may do more harm than good. For Portland Police, statistics combined with professional judgment are now the rule when police decide which domestic violence cases to pursue. Each morning a computer spits out a report, and Portland officers have a hot sheet of the suspects most likely to commit another act of domestic violence. "This is super efficient because it lets us target the most dangerous offenders," says Portland Police Sgt. Greg Stewart. 16 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE W INTER 2012 "Plus in a practical sense, it frees two to three officers a day to go do work, which is just enormous. It was like adding two more investigators to the unit." In the first year, says Stewart, the number of cases investi– gated doubled and arrest rates were up 15 percent. "It made a real immediate impact. We were able to do more work and able to focus the work on bigger problem people." It's been so successful at reducing police time on paperwork that officials from the Multnomah County District Attorney's office as well as Seattle police are looking at Henning's work with an eye to developing their own checklists. HEN NI NG O FTEN WOR KS withthreeorfourstudentsto analyze real-world crime issues using Portland Police data. Last year, a team looked at burglaries. Reviewing Portland statistics, they found that a burglar is more likely to commit several crimes in the same area within days or weeks of each other. That gave police a way to link items missing from several homes to what they found in one burglar's stash-clearing multiple cases based on one arrest. For the past six months, police have been able to plug an address into a computer for a report of potentially linked burglaries. One officer, says Sgt. Stewart, recently used the system to link seven additional burglaries in east Portland to a single suspect. What's next? Henning hopes to create a simple checklist to use in each of the 25,000 or so arrests made in Portland each year. That doesn't mean there are 25,000 bad guys-rather, some people are arrested more than once. By identifying who is most likely to commit another crime or be violent, law enforcement can focus resources, such as parole officer visits and drug tests during probation, where the benefit is highest. And chat just might help keep more bad guys out of circula– tion without hiring more police or building more jails. ■ Melissa Steineger, a Portlandfreelance writer, wrote the article "Training on Site" in the fall 2011 Portland State Magazine.