Still the One...

Last year, in July, I blogged about the repeat, repeat, repeat offenders in Shelby County. I had done some analysis of the data and found a person I believe has been arrested the most. Kimberly Johnson is a female black, rni # 68844. In July she had been arrested 200 times. Today she is in the county lockup and has bumped her grand total to 208 arrests. Isn't it about time something was done with people who have demonstrated they WILL NOT contribute to society? I guess you could say she stimulates the economy though. She is certainly providing work for law enforcement, courts, pre-trial, etc.

I believe people like this are the reason we have such a crime problem in our community. Until we do something that sends a strong signal to them, that we will not allow such behavior, they will continue to drag our community down. As I've said many times before, if we applied some simple Psychology, what I call the hot-plate approach to law enforcement, we would see a drastic drop in crime. How many times has anyone burned themselves on a hot stove? Usually, the answer is once. The punishment is swift, certain and severe. If we want to stop the crime, all we need do is ramp up on the negative reinforcements. Of that I'm positive!

Something Old, Something New

I have accepted a position with the Memphis Police Department as a technical consultant. I will be helping to create the Real Time Crime Center and also working on other projects. My email address there is - John.Harvey@memphistn.gov . If you have need to contact me for any business related to policing or law enforcement, feel free to send me an email.

The something old is that I will be developing systems that put critical information into the hands of those who use our systems. The website I developed while assigned to the District Attorney's office has enabled officers to make thousands of arrests over the years. That base code was also utilized by my brother Lt. Jim Harvey of the MPD and his partner Sgt. Joey Catanzaro to develop the MPD's KIOSK which has had the same results.

The something new is that I have more ideas about how we can better utilize data to combat crime and the MPD command staff is very supportive. That wasn't the case at the SCSO. I have talked about some of my ideas on my cyber-posse.com website and there are others I'd like to see implemented, but in due time. In Thursday's meeting I raised the issue of repeat, repeat, repeat offenders to Dr. Janikowski and his eyes lit up. He said we need that information. I also spoke with the director about it and he too wants to further develop that information and to use it to point out what must be done to correct the problems. They already knew that we had a repeat offender problem, but weren't aware of the exact numbers.

Sidebar:
I attended the MPD’s tracks meeting last Thursday (modeled on New York’s Compstat) and I must say I was impressed. It was refreshing to see the Director get up and lead the session. He knows whereof he speaks because he has worked the streets. He is measuring successes and failures and holding commanders accountable for the effectiveness of crime reduction strategies in their areas. We’ve got some great plans in store for the MPD and other agencies that will be accessing the systems we develop. I predict a precipitous drop in crime over the next year or so.


On another note. I’m also having a little trouble getting used to being appreciated, but I’m sure I can adapt!