TracKRS Update

Ron Shave, Consultant to the Orange County D.A.'s office

For years the DA's Office has successfully provided vertical prosecution units in the areas of homicide, sexual assaults, domestic violence and major frauds. We extended the Homicide Unit's role of vertical prosecution and implemented a homicide and sexual assault database and task force review of unsolved murders in Orange County.

The new unit was called TracKRS (Task Force Review Aimed at Catching Killers, Rapists and Sexual Offenders), and was created and runs off the askSam engine and has two primary objectives:

1.     To provide an easy-to-use, immediately available database of homicide and sexual assault information to the field investigators. We don't want the predators to slip through undetected.

2.     To cooperate with the local agencies, facilitate review of unsolved cases involving female, sexually assaulted murder victims for the purpose of looking for fresh leads when compared to the MO's in the database and to have old evidence re-evaluated with new technology.

This update explains how far TracKERS has come and how it has made Orange County, LA a safer place to live. We couldn't be more pleased with the collection of askSam databases created to help homicide and sexual assault investigators.

In 1995 there was no collection of data describing the thousands of unsolved sexual assaults and nearly 1,000 unsolved murders that had occurred in Orange County since about 1970. In the meantime, DNA had become a powerful tool for law enforcement. Previously unsolved cases can be solved and previously solved sexual assaults cases can help link offenders by the characteristics of the offense.

Our priorities have been established, in a large part, by FBI statistics suggesting that if you have identified a sexual offender that the person will commit on the average 5.2 felony sexual assaults that he will never be held accountable to. Also, 94% of the identified sexual killers have prior felony sexual assault convictions. This information motivated the collection of previously prosecuted cases being entered into the database, as well as the unsolved cases.

Since going online in a dialup environment we have been aggressively entering thousands of case descriptions into the primary database. Today, we have over 1,600 murders and nearly 5,000 felony sexual assaults described and online. In January of 2001 we transitioned the databases to a secure Internet environment using the county's firewall and Verisign SSL.

The Los Angeles Times reported on April 16, 2001 “A string of arrests in old murder cases has catapulted Orange County from worst to first when it comes to solving homicides in Southern California…”

This “dramatic turnaround” since TracKRS was implemented in 1997 is a direct result of an overwhelming team effort supported by Orange County administrators. District Attorney Tony Rackauckas, Sheriff Mike Carona and every chief have supported TracKRS. Santa Ana Police Chief Paul Walters has provided the working facilities since inception. The Sheriff's Crime Lab has committed extensive resources, as well as their cold case unit, C.L.U.E. Many cities have supported the reviews of cold cases and Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Anaheim, Costa Mesa, and Newport Beach, among others, have committed investigators solely to cold case investigations.

Although TracKRS role is to provide good investigators good information, TracKRS itself has solved several homicide and rape cases during the research process.

The TracKRS Review Committee is a multi-agency team that helps identify obstacles to successful investigations. The result of the committee's recommendations has been the establishment of additional askSam resources that enable TracKRS to coordinate the collection of DNA samples, organize murder case due diligence efforts, and identify and track the laboratory examinations of crime scene evidence.

Case management and blood collection query menus.

As of January 2001 we believe that we provide investigators with the three essential elements required to get good results; an MO database, an offender database and an evidence examination tracking system. Each system is designed as an investigator's tool. They are simple, check box queries that provide immediate results.

TracKRS has provided many other resources and services to Orange County investigators, but none of this would have been possible had it not been for the powerful and flexible askSam development environment.

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Orange County is located in southern California, south/east of Los Angeles, and serves a population of nearly 3,000,000 people and more than 23 police agencies. TracKRS has nearly 400 authorized users.

Ron Shave is a Consultant to the Orange County D.A.'s office, and recently retired after 31 years in law enforcement.

CMS By RDShave

(714) 330-1521 Cell Phone

rdshave@attbi.com