California Department of Justice Joins Law Enforcement Data Initiative

>>ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA D. HARRIS: I'm Kamala Harris and I'm very proud to stand here with leaders of law enforcement, representing many agencies in Southern California who are part of the extraordinarily innovative program - CBIS - that is the subject of our press conference this afternoon. We have representatives from Los Angeles and Orange County sheriffs' departments, police departments, federal, state and local law enforcement agencies who are all re-committing their efforts and their increasingly dwindling resources to everything that we need to do to collaborate and cooperate and combine our intelligence and information in a way that results in public safety for the people we serve. So, we are here to talk in particular about CBIS, which is the Community Based Information System that was created out of Lee Baca's Sheriffs Department. It is a perfect example of everything that we here in California are famous for. It is about the adoption of technology; it is about innovation; it is about creating models that the country will then follow. And all of this focused specifically on how we can be smart in keeping our communities safe. I'm proud also to announce today that the California Department of Justice has just signed a Memorandum of Understanding and we will be participating in and a partner in CBIS, which is essentially an information-sharing system. It is collaborative not only among local, state and federal law enforcement, it is collaborative with other agencies, government agencies that can supply us with information that helps the cop on the street do the job they want to do with all the information they need to keep that community safe. It is about focusing on what we need to do around one of our collective priorities, which is of course the most dangerous and serious crime that we're seeing here in L.A. and surrounding regions - Orange County - which is gang crime. It's about collecting information and intelligence in a way that we can communicate with each other in an accurate, effective and swift way to know what is going on in a particular community and what are that community's law enforcement needs. It helps us to understand information in a way that collects approximately hundreds of thousands of data points that ranges from the demographic of that community, that ranges from how many liquor stores are in that community. We're looking at things like how many schools are in that community, how many social services are in that community so that when that officer is on the beat, on the street, he or she can do everything they want to do to address the incident in front of them. And the range of that work is varied. Sometimes it may be that that officer simply wants to figure out how that homeless person they're in contact with can get into a shelter. It may be that that officer on the street recognizes that that juvenile is actually walking the street in the middle of the day, when they should be in school, and the officer wants to figure out what is the school in this district where that kid should be. It is about addressing the fact that officers on the street do a lot that is interactive and helpful to that community, above and beyond arresting a suspect. It is often about helping a person in need. It is often about helping a person in distress, and one of the best tools that we can have is the information at our fingertips to be able to address the incident as it is occurring. So, it's exciting in terms of the technology, it's exciting in terms of the mobility of it, and the versatility of it, and I'm going to allow Sheriff Baca to talk in much more detail about that, but I also want to praise the Sheriff for being smart in a way that also realizes that we're going to have to, in many situations, do more with less. He started out with a simple $200,000 grant, and I'll tell you that this technology and this system will prove over a short period of time to probably save us millions of dollars in terms of preventing redundancies and allowing us to be swift and to deal with issues as they are occurring in real time. And certainly all law enforcement agencies are going to benefit as a result. So, I want to thank everyone who is here behind me and I also want to recognize their work all morning and all day in the Zone meeting that we had, which was a closed meeting of police chiefs, of elected sheriffs, elected D.A.'s, Tony Rackauckas, was here earlier, and we basically got in a closed room and we shared the innovations. We shared the new methods. We shared best practices and we were 200 law enforcement leaders in a room engaged in the excellence of this profession of law enforcement. And so I want to recognize them and thank them all and now I'm going to pass the microphone over to Sheriff Lee Baca. Lee? [pause] >>SHERIFF LEE BACA: Thank you, thank you, Attorney General. First of all, congratulations and gratitude goes to the Attorney General of California for her leadership in what we now are commonly referring to as being smart about crime. And I believe that her vision, along with Southern California law enforcement, is in complete harmony with one another. Simply, what we're trying to do is something here with partnering in the matter that a very important person who authored a healthy communities document. Her name is Constance Rice. She's a civil rights attorney. The City of Los Angeles, along with the police department, commissioned a study and was able to establish what does constitute a healthy community. The information system that the Attorney General eluded to is part of a wraparound-services concept that it's predictable that a community that is not healthy -- where perhaps there is a percent of undereducated people living in a clustered environment -- that this could affect the way they solve their problems, the way that they acquire employment, the way that the community interacts in a manner that allows for it to become more of a growth process as opposed to a stalled at the top at the ceiling somewhere because there's too much crime. So, the healthy community approach, that the City of Los Angeles authored through Connie Rice and the Advancement Project, is one that we have taken very seriously in this county. The offshoot of this information system is that we need to know how healthy the community is, and it's been established very strongly that an unhealthy community will result in a significant amount of crime. So, as we take these schools and we help them be stronger, with the kids finally going from kindergarten to graduation, when we find that the unemployment is lower, we find that in certain communities the unemployment is 20 percent, 25 percent, you get to these factors and you ask yourself: well, no one wonder there's a lot of crime, because there's a lot of despair. And so it's the ability of the Attorney General, in her initiative about being smart on crime, that we are matching up and partnering, not only in Southern California, but the entire State of California. And we are going beyond because there are regions in the United States that have the same issues. And by advancing the goal of the Attorney General to be smart, we here believe that we have a true partner in tough times with budgets and things that are difficult. We are going to exhort that the legislature and the Governor and the Speaker of the House and the Assembly and the persons that are in charge of our very, very important state government, understand that the Attorney General's Office is a true contributory partner in reducing crime. The $71 million dollar cut that was proposed to this current budget is unacceptable. We are going to ask diligently every legislator to just keep our very, very strong and effective Attorney General's Office in tact. We cannot afford to lose momentum as we are becoming more and more progressive. So, my colleagues and I are so grateful that the Attorney General is here. We're grateful that she has the energy, the vision and the enthusiasm to get tough jobs done. And finally, I'll quote her point: None of us signed up for these jobs because they were easy. We know it's difficult and the Attorney General, however, is making it more plausible that we can do more and we will do more. Thank you very much, Attorney General. >>ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA D. HARRIS: Thank you. [end]