For Detective Timothy Blanke of the Dane County, Wisconsin Sheriff’s Office, Field Services Division, solving crimes and enforcing the law still come down to traditional law-enforcement strategies. “Once you have a suspect, you try to fill in the blanks by building a spoked wheel of connections,” he says. “You start to see who has mutual connections, and you start to identify patterns and see what other hubs emerge.”

Two key challenges get in the way of creating these “spoked wheels.” One is the proliferation of mobile devices in use by criminals. “Suspects’ phones are their lives,” says Blanke. “Everything is there – communications, connections, movements – and it all makes for powerful evidence.” The challenge is accessing this data, along with having efficient tools for extracting useful insights.

The overlapping law enforcement responsibilities around the county’s 1,200 square miles make collaboration among agencies essential. For the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, that collaboration has been strengthened by technology – specifically, Investigative Analytics, which investigators, analysts, and prosecutors use to share Digital Intelligence, collaborate on cases, surface leads, and build out the “spoked wheels” that help solve cases and bring criminals to justice. (Digital Intelligence is the data collected and preserved from digital sources and data types [smartphones, computers, and the Cloud] and the process by which agencies collect, review, analyze, manage, and obtain insights from this data to run their investigations more efficiently.)

The Case

Collaboration and data sharing proved especially effective in the recent case of an ongoing car theft ring operating in the county. The thieves were taking advantage of people leaving their cars outside running for a few minutes to warm them up on winter mornings; after scouting for cars, the thieves simply hopped in and drove away. Some criminals had even been bold enough to enter people’s homes and steal purses and car keys, an alarming and potentially dangerous escalation of their tactics.

The Challenges

Aside from the challenge of accessing and leveraging Digital Intelligence, cases like this present challenges in terms of apprehending suspects in a safe, responsible way. Airplane surveillance was considered a costly and inefficient use of resources. Tactics that might lead to a chase were also off the table.

“We used to just chase these cars until the wheels fell off and arrest the bad guys that way,” Blanke says. “But we can no longer have the dangers that come with that. We had to find a way to work smarter, and use the clues that we can find to solve crimes without putting the general public at risk.”

The Solution

As Blanke explains, just having Digital Intelligence in hand may not be enough when there are multiple jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies present, as is the case in Dane County.

“Because we have clusters of different departments – City and State Police as well as the Sheriff’s Department – a suspect can walk across the street and be in a different city and jurisdiction,” he says.

“You need to be in constant communication with your other agencies as to who’s working on what, because two burglaries right across the street from each other could be in two different towns,” Blanke adds.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office already had Cellebrite’s complete Digital Intelligence Platform in place, including UFED 4PC and Cellebrite Physical Analyzer to collect and review data, and Cellebrite Pathfinder to handle investigative analytics. This meant they could collect data from phones collected at crime scenes or confiscated from suspects by their officers or those of other state and county law enforcement. Madison city police were using social media to track suspects, who left lots of clues there.

Using Cellebrite solutions, the Sheriff’s Department had enough to build out their “spoked wheel” of suspects and activity. Eventually they even collected selfie videos that suspects had made with the stolen cars.

The Solution

“We played the long game,” Blanke says. “As soon as we had files on given cars and suspects, we’d send over a set of charges.” Eventually about 70 charges were filed against suspects, although the investigations are ongoing.

“We’re keeping all the files in Cellebrite Pathfinder, ready to go,” he says. “When the next round of car thefts occurs, we can feed in new data and see if it’s the same guys at work, or if we have new players.”

Take-aways from this case that may be helpful to other agencies involved in similar investigations include:

Collaboration between agencies and jurisdictions is key. When agencies and jurisdictions overlap, they can collect, combine, and analyze digital evidence. The shared intelligence is a powerful tool for bringing suspects to justice.

Digital Intelligence is complementing (not replacing) traditional policing. No matter how large a role technology plays in investigations, it still takes officers with knowledge of local people and places to complete an investigative effort.

Technology helps build a “spoked wheel” of evidence. Law enforcement officers need to see connections between crimes and suspects in order to make a case. Digital Intelligence technology brings together digital evidence to surface these connections.

To learn more about Cellebrite’s full suite of Digital Intelligence solutions, visit Cellebrite.com

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