Christopher Peak Photo
The intel center.
Against the digital map of New Haven’s streets, blue and gridded like graph paper, a yellow pin stuck out in Newhallville, marking where bullets had flown last night and automatically tripped up the city’s ShotSpotter system.
That pin on a television screen would serve as the marker unifying the department’s old-fashioned intelligence-gathering.
That visual reference of a recent non-fatal shooting hung over the city’s top cops in a third-floor conference room Tuesday at the New Haven Police Department headquarters at 1 Union Ave.
In that room, command staffers would share what leads they’d gathered so far and decide what verified info should be pushed out to beat cops on the street to try to pick out who’d fired the gun.
For the last two years, that room, known as the Elm City Intel Center, has been the node where law enforcement coordinates its crime-fighting strategies. That can range from a social worker dropping by a suspect’s house to federal prosecutors writing up indictments.
On Tuesday the department invited reporters in to take a look.
In 2017, the otherwise-nondescript, white-walled, blue-carpeted and flourescent-lit conference room became the command center for the department’s surveillance and communication technology, thanks to some upgrades by the city’s information technology and engineering teams that Assistant Chief Herb Johnson requested.
Close to 200 security cameras from street corners around the city now live-stream footage onto a row of flat-screen televisions. Detectives can pull up recordings timed with crimes onto a wall-sized screen.
Lt. Herb Sharp.
With that hardware at their disposal, district managers now show up in the Intel Center each Tuesday morning for COMPAS — a Comprehensive Accountability Session, as Lt. Herb Sharp — to discuss what’s been happening in their neighborhoods, reviewing crime trends and presenting month-long plans to reverse them.
And department brass show up in the conference room every day to review what information they’ve gleaned about car break-ins, burglaries, murders and other crime to blast out to the force.
“We broke down all the silos,” Assistant Chief Johnson said.
New Haven’s commanders said that kind of coordination isn’t happening in other departments. They argue the coordination has helped plunge the city’s violent crime rate to the lowest point in decades.
“The corny saying that all cops know: ‘If one of us knew what all of us knew, then all the crimes would be solve,’” said Lt. Karl Jacobson, the head of the Shooting Task Force and Narcotics Enforcement Unit who also runs the Intel Center. “It’s about collecting the intel in a common place, having a place for detectives and officers to come and for us to meet as command staff and, the final piece, actually pushing it out.”
Lt. Karl Jacobson.
Sharp and Jacobson said that they’re not just collecting the evidence they need to bust wrong-doers. They credit Project Longevity, the initiative that aims to stop gun violence by offering gang members a choice between a stable career or a prison sentence, with proactively stopping feuds before they turn deadly.
Checking in with confidential informants, cops find out who’s feuding, Jacobson said. At the Intel Center, command staff can then target their response to a handful of suspects who are most at risk of engaging in the crossfire, he said.
Sometimes, that means sending Stacy Spell, Project Longevity’s project manager, to tell a gang member that he’s been “targeted to be saved.”
Or it could mean asking probation officers to put a GPS tracker on a recently released ex-con, telling them to use it as an excuse to dodge their old crews, Jacobson said. “Blame us,” he tells former gang members, and he’s heard them say, “Thank you.”
“It’s not just arrests, we’re talking to people,” Jacobson said. “It’s about stopping the violence. It’s still extremely hard to clear non-fatal shootings because of the lack of witnesses, but we don’t need to clear it if we stop it ahead of time.”
Pointing to several stats, the commanders said that the approach is yielding results.
Compared to 2008, when the ShotSpotter system was first rolled out, it’s now far more common to receive a 911 call when a gun goes off, Johnson said.
Jacobson also said those shootings are far rarer, down from an average of 134 shootings between 2003 – 2011 to an average of 62 shootings from 2012 on. He added that the department is also nabbing more guns, too, with 31 recovered so far this year, compared to 13 at this point last year.
The Intel Center isn’t a cure-all, Johnson cautioned, as technology can still fail, as it did with the unsolved slaying of 14-year-old Tyrick Keyes in July 2017, which wasn’t picked up by the ShotSpotter nor caught on security camera. He said that’s where relationships have to come in.
“The technology only gets so far,” he said. “It’s partnerships and old-fashioned police work.”