Atlanta Police Develop Innovative Intelligence-Sharing Network

This report was prepared by the City of Atlanta and edited for publication.

An investigative, intelligence-sharing platform developed by the Atlanta Police Department that has dramatically improved prosecutions of gang members may soon include neighboring agencies as part of a metro-wide law enforcement collaboration initiative.

The Atlanta Police Intelligence Network (APIN), developed in partnership with Formulytics, an Atlanta-based software development company, has revolutionized the APD’s approach to investigating crimes involving gangs, and resulted in better cases presented to the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office.

Since launch of the case file system, indictments increased 97 percent from 2011 to 2012, and guilty pleas on Georgia gang statute violations were achieved in 22 of 31 cases.

“Through the partnership with Formulytics, the Atlanta Police Department has taken a giant leap forward in the fight against gang violence,” said Mayor Kasim Reed in a news release. “This technology has enabled much smarter, much faster investigations and the results speak for themselves. With my full support, the Atlanta Police Department will continue to embrace the newest crime fighting tools that allow strategic deployment of resources and strengthened presence on the streets.”

APIN is a comprehensive web-based platform that organizes investigations, including homicides and criminal gang activity. Rather than investigating gang-related crimes as individual incidents, investigators are able to address the organized structure of criminal gangs and view them in a larger picture. Gang investigations exist in a “living file” that tracks criminal activity over time, and includes information on gang history, identifiers (graffiti, tattoos, hand signs, etc.) and members.

The innovative system is accessible to investigators, and also allows them to collaborate more easily when investigating crimes. The system automatically alerts investigators in the APD’s Gang and Homicide units of links between complex criminal investigations. Just this year alone, more than 1,000 links have been identified between investigations conducted by those units.

In the past, investigators had to manually search voluminous paper investigative files and rely on conversations to find such links. While such conversations continue to be vital, the APIN system organizes complex investigative files and immediately alerts the investigators to links between cases.

The APD has initiated conversations with Clayton and DeKalb counties, in hopes their police departments will also adopt APIN and increase intelligence-sharing metro-wide. Formulytics and APD are in the process of building a collaborative pilot network for those counties.

“Criminals don’t restrict their activities to geographical boundaries,” said Atlanta Police Chief George Turner in the release. “So, it’s critical that police share intelligence across city and county lines. This network will greatly improve our collaboration and communication with other law enforcement agencies to help identify, arrest and prosecute these dangerous gang members.”