COPLINK is a data warehousing model developed in the Artificial Intelligence Lab for use by law enforcement. It allows multiple agencies to share information which may be used to solve crimes.

How it Works Using supercomputers to track down criminals has frequently been the stuff of television shows and movies. But real police work is largely about making telephone calls and tediously plowing through written records and databases. The reality is that computers are only just starting to make a difference in day-to-day law enforcement. COPLINK is what Professor Chen and others in the supercomputing realm describe as "text mining" software. Text mining involves reading mountains of text, documents, Internet pages, mail, police reports, medical records, and so on, and then making some sense out of all of it. "We apply linguistic techniques called natural language processing to identify the key entities or topics or concepts in texts," says Professor Chen. The object is getting the computer to read the text just like a human reader, looking for key topics and how information is organized. The second part of text mining, says Professor Chen, is statistical analysis, grouping similar documents together, finding relationships between the identified topics. COPLINK works by searching multiple police databases, and it can retrieve information in seconds that once took trained investigators hours, days, even weeks to sort through.

When the Washington, D.C.-area snipers were still on the loose, Tucson police officers, Lt. Jennifer Schroeder and Detective Tim Peterson headed out, software in hand, to install a system on the East coast already in use by the Tucson Police Department.

The software they installed? COPLINK–a program developed by McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems (MIS) Hsinchun Chen and the Eller College's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

As the snipers wreaked havoc, law enforcement officials at the local, state, and federal level were dealing with massive amounts of information and hundreds of thousands of tips and leads. It was the National Institute of Justice, the research and development arm of the Justice Department that helped fund COPLINK's development, that suggested the sniper task force take a look at using the product.

And while the snipers were actually caught the day after Schroeder and Petersen arrived, officials used the software to sift through and validate the mountain of leads that surfaced after the arrests were made.

COPLINK is an innovative intranet system that enables law enforcement agencies to communicate secure, easily accessible, and accurate information across jurisdictions through a Web-based interface.

The system was designed in partnership with the Tucson Police Department where more than 1.5 million written criminal reports have been assimilated. The plan is to install mobile terminals "armed" with COPLINK in all patrol cars.

While COPLINK requires hefty computing capabilities, the cost of supercomputers has dropped dramatically in recent years, likely making it more affordable for smaller police agencies. Investigators using COPLINK can pull together disparately related fragments of evidence–a nickname, a partial license plate number or a bullet fragment–from various agency databases.

Tucson Police recently used it to find a federal homicide suspect when their only information was a tip from an informant that the suspect had a sister in Tucson. The woman had been assaulted by a boyfriend several years earlier, and the police only had the name of the boyfriend. From that bit of information, COPLINK was able to extract the woman's name and the name of her brother in less than a minute.

COPLINK received national media coverage in a feature story run by the New York Times on November 2nd.

Time is often critical in solving a crime. If an investigation takes days, a suspect could easily slip away. Using COPLINK, police might not be able to immediately zero in on an exact suspect, but they can quickly put together a list of leads that could be checked out during an investigator's shift. As Professor Chen says, it's like asking the last 150 cops who worked on similar cases for their input and getting an answer back in a few seconds.

Following the lead of Tucson, the Phoenix Police Department has recently also adopted COPLINK. In addition, seventeen local law enforcement agencies in Arizona, along with congressional delegates and four federal offices, have already pledged support for tying all local agencies together with COPLINK. COPLINK has also been installed by law enforcement agencies in Iowa, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Texas. And with the recent passage of the Homeland Security Act, COPLINK could become a crucial tool in navigating the mounds of data strewn across multiple law enforcement agencies.