Gulf Coast Technology Center (GCTC) may be one of the most unique law enforcement collaborations in the world. The original idea came from James H. Barber, who was the police chief for the City of Mobile, AL back in 2015 when the project began. (Barber is now Public Safety Director for the City of Mobile.)

Barber’s vision was not unlike what Arthur allegedly envisioned for the Round Table: Gather partners from the best law enforcement agencies (GCTC counts the FBI, Secret Service, and several of our military branches among its members) and hold them to the highest investigative standards (GCTC follows Secret Service standards). Equip them with the latest Digital Intelligence technology and house them in a state-of-the-art facility (a “Round Table” if you will) where there are no walls and collaboration is as easy as leaning over the wall of your cubicle to exchange ideas with a representative from another agency at the next desk. Connect them all through a cloud-based collaboration system that allows the entire team to triage cases on a big screen. And finally, turn them loose.

Bringing Agencies Together

Barber didn’t build GCTC into the case-solving juggernaut that it is today by himself, however. That took several years of hard work by Kevin Levy, who is now Commander of the Mobile Police Department’s Cyber Division. Commander Levy is a stop-at- nothing kind of guy who loves challenges. Starting from scratch, he drafted the players, then built the facility that now houses some 40 participants representing partners from 27 different federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, and several military entities.

The beauty of GCTC is that because they are so diversified, the team can handle multiple cases running down parallel tracks at the same time. If one team gets stuck, the other cases can keep right on going until the roadblock is removed (through team collaboration) and the case that was momentarily halted can resume.

GCTC renders assistance in cases from five surrounding states and has helped in cases stretching from New Orleans to Jacksonville and as far north as Tennessee. And here’s the kicker: If you’re hung up on a case and need GCTC’s assistance, all you have to do is ask. “There’s no paperwork,” Commander Levy explained in a recent interview, “just a handshake. As long as somebody needs something as mutual assistance, we’ll do it. So it’s not just ‘What’s in the best interest for MPD [Mobile Police Department]? It’s ‘What’s in the best interest for the community and the Gulf Coast?’”

The strategy is paying off in big ways, too. Last year, GCTC saw a little over 2,500 devices come through their facility. This represents more than half of the devices in the entire region. And that number is growing. Those units don’t just gather dust in a corner, either.

From the outset, Commander Levy committed to guaranteeing a 2½-week turn- around period on devices. He has been able to maintain that pace not merely by adding headcount, but by adding more devices, licenses, and discovering that with the right training, one person can multitask on three different machines. This has made his lab team incredibly efficient, but the real secret to the sauce they cook at GCTC comes from harnessing the power of analytics.

The Impact Of Analytics

Everything that comes in gets co-joined in Cellebrite Pathfinder. “We don’t separate by agencies,” Commander Levy said, “so everything’s getting dumped into one master case, if that makes sense. And so we’re building contact repositories [and] cross referencing everything.”

Used in concert with a full suite of Cellebrite tools, Commander Levy’s team is able to “tell the whole story” using Digital Intelligence, from the first moment a crime occurs to moment the prosecutor enters the courtroom. As a result, crimes are down and case closures are up. Digital evidence has helped remove the most prolific offenders from the street and successfully closed cases that may have previously remained opened.

An added bonus is that cross referencing contact and other information in their database has allowed GCTC to develop an additional resource that investigators can use to solve other kinds of cases. As Commander Levy explains, “they can call up and give us a phone number and say, ‘Can you run this phone number through your system and see what it’s related to?’

“They may not have ever dropped off a phone, but they may just have a drug dealer’s phone number. We can run it through our system and see whether that phone number is connected to any of our devices that we’ve ever imaged. And what we’ve found is we’re able to provide more of a service than if we had just compartmentalized that.

“We’ve had several “bad-drug-death” cases, if you will, so they bought bad drugs and died. The dealer themself may not have known, but the person they’re getting it from, the supplier, does. And so we’ve connected lots of those cases.”

A recent case study shows just how well GCTC’s multi-agency collaboration system works.

A Major Case Comes To Light

Several months ago Commander Levy’s team received a simple vehicle theft case. After a short investigation they arrested an individual who had been stealing vehicles and ATV’s.

As Commander Levy explained, “The arresting officers uncovered two cell phones in that case—one was in the vehicle they arrested the suspect in and the other was in his pocket. This was a City of Mobile Police Department case, so they brought the two phones in.

One of the phone examiners on Commander Levy’s team happened to be from the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office. They looked at GCTC’s collaboration cloud screen and noticed that some of the information was eerily familiar to a case they were working in Baldwin County.

The examiner asked if he could take those phones, do the exam, and run them through Cellebrite Pathfinder. When he did so, he realized that the cases he had been working in Baldwin County were potentially related. He got the phones from the Baldwin County case and added those two or three cell phones to the case.

What started with two phones now had about five phones in evidence, which was building toward a master conspiracy involving the same players.

Commander Levy said that the examiner then compared the contact lists in the two cases and quickly realized that these people knew each other, so he began adding some geopoints to the investigation.

Those two cases then became a talking point, according to Commander Levy. “We have regular information sharing [sessions] with our analysts [who] contact the investigators in all of these cases and ask them what they’re looking for and what it is they’re trying to accomplish. This is sort of part of that story telling. So we don’t just blindly dump a phone. We examine phones and dump the evidence while our analysts are trying to figure out what it is that the “customer,” (our investigators), are looking for.

“Once the story begins to get told, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a person that might be working for another person,’ and we realize that all of these people sort of were reporting to an unknown entity together, and that they may not have known each other directly but they all have a third person in common, the case began to expand.…

“By the end of May, we had probably 15 phones that had been taken and put into this one file. So what that means is there’s multiple people around.”

The Case Grows Larger

What started out as a car-theft ring morphed into a vehicle-theft ring and a firearms- theft ring. The firearms-theft ring then turned into a firearms-distribution ring on the street where the guns were being sold. The guns then lead to two active cases of homicide.

The investigators would have never known where the guns came from had they not seized the phones from these cars that were being used by people who were stealing cars and guns.

According to Commander Levy, “All of that happened within about three weeks. The one homicide case had been open for almost a year, and it was one of our partner’s cases. The other homicide case was a local case here [in Mobile], and potentially— this part yet to be determined, they’re still working part of it—might potentially involve some occupied-dwelling shootings. Drive-by shootings, where nobody was actually killed, wouldn’t get filed under homicides because nobody died, but we believe one of the suspects might potentially be related.”

summarized the case this way. “Had we not reached out to all of those investigators from all of those different agencies independently during the analytical process, we would never have been able to piece together all of the pieces of the story.

“All of the tools came together…so we’ve created an assembly line that functions the same way the story would be told, which is: Get the data, process the data, analyze the data, and communicate directly with the requester. The product that we give back [then] is not only for the investigator but also for the prosecutor [because] we’re able to explain to them how we got the evidence and what it was.”

Pointing to the power of placing everything in Cellebrite Pathfinder, Commander Levy summarized the case this way. “Had we not reached out to all of those investigators from all of those different agencies independently during the analytical process, we would never have been able to piece together all of the pieces of the story.

“All of the tools came together…so we’ve created an assembly line that functions the same way the story would be told, which is: Get the data, process the data, analyze the data, and communicate directly with the requester. The product that we give back [then] is not only for the investigator but also for the prosecutor [because] we’re able to explain to them how we got the evidence and what it was.”

Telling the full story of investigations to better prepare prosecutors is at the heart of what Gulf Coast Technology Center is all about. The result is a reduction in crimes, an increase in case closures, a safer world, and a Digital Intelligence model worth emulating.

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