Silicon Valley Start-up Is Helping Police Get Smarter About Solving Gun Crimes

espite its depiction in Hollywood, police work is often a startlingly low-tech enterprise. Futuristic laboratories and slick computer interfaces are few and far between. Instead, information relevant to the investigation of crimes is often fragmented and confusing, stored in an array of aged software and incomplete databases that can’t communicate with each other. 

Tevelyon Jones, a captain with the Oakland Police Department, found that his department collected troves of data on gun crimes — but rarely connected the dots. Street cops working a murder might have no idea that acoustic sensors picked up gunshots near the crime scene. Detectives working a string of robberies might miss reports of similar crimes happening in a neighboring jurisdiction. Jones, who did stints in Oakland’s homicide and gang units, said that when pursuing a case, “you had to hope that you talked to somebody that knew a thing or two about what you were researching.”

Luckily for Oakland police, just a few miles away in Silicon Valley, a group of entrepreneurs and former law enforcement officials were working on a digital portal designed to streamline the collection and analysis of police data. Released in 2012, the “Law Enforcement Analysis Portal,” or LEAP, is software that scoops up troves of unfiltered law enforcement data — from arrest notes, to gun trace reports, to license plate scans — and then collates and analyzes it. The data lives in a centralized, searchable repository, accessible to thousands of law enforcement agencies. Forensic Logic, the company behind LEAP, calls the technology the “Google for crime.”