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Good afternoon. My name is Larry Gillick. I'm with OPM's Training and Executive Development
Group. Today, we are going to talk about data. Not data in a dull way. Data that tells a
story, reveals its secrets, and in this case cuts crime and saves lives.
For that I am pleased to introduce Michael Miller of the Department of the Interior's
Bureau of Indian Affairs. Mr. Miller has more than 20 years of law enforcement experience,
during which he has worked at the city, county and federal levels.
Mr. Miller is currently on a 24 month detail from the FBI as the acting Deputy Associate
Director for Law Enforcement Operations at the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Justice
Services. In this position, he supervises nine special agents in charge and more than
400 federal police officers and special agents across Indian country.
Prior to being named to his current position, Mr. Miller served as the Special Assistant
to the Executive Assistant Director of the FBI's Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services
Branch. In this role, he focused on leading strategic projects that addressed a wide array
of operational, organizational and management challenges within the branch and associated
divisions.
Before joining the FBI, he helped develop leading edge solutions for some of the largest
police agencies in the world and still is a recognized expert in policing and criminal
justice.
Mr. Miller received his undergraduate degree from Texas A&M University, and he has a Masters
of Public Administration from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
Now, to tell the story of how BIA used data to help reduce violent crime in Indian country,
Michael Miller. Michael.
Good afternoon everyone. Thanks for having me. Thank you, Larry, for the kind introduction.
I'd also like to thank OPM for having us and allowing us the opportunity to tell our story.
Good afternoon to everybody joining us in this webinar. I thank you for taking time
out of your schedule to be with us. I hope that you get something out of this as we tell
our story.
As Larry said, I'm Michael Miller. I'm the Deputy Associate Director for Operations at
the Bureau of Indian Affairs' Office of Justice Services. This afternoon, I'm going to be
talking to you about data and about data analytics, and our growth over the last several years
in using data to make decisions and to drive our strategy.
I'm going to take you along a journey from merely capturing data in paper format to embracing
data, and actually ultimately using that data and information, as well as IT, to help us
improve performance and save lives.
We are a work in progress. I do want to say that at the beginning. We are at the beginning
of our journey, and we have a long way to go. But I do hope that you will take some
of our lessons learned as I go through this, and that we can make it applicable to your
agency and that we'll both derive some benefit out of this.
In full disclosure, I also wanted to say that I am by no means an expert in this area. I'm
hopeful that you'll find some value through sharing our challenges with you.
I also wanted to say that this was a team effort. This was a collaboration with both
our tribal partners and all of our law enforcement and our own personnel in any successes that
we talk about today. By no means do I want to claim any sole responsibility for any success
we talk about here, just because I'm up here at the podium, today.
If you'll go to my next slide, I wanted to tell you just a little bit about who BIA is,
before we begin. BIA is a federal government agency in the Department of Interior. We were
originally created in 1824, as part of the War Department. We are responsible for providing
a multitude of services to Native Americans throughout the U.S. One of the things that
we do is provide justice services, criminal investigations, policing, detention services,
technical assistance to tribal courts, etc., to a number of tribes.
We're going to talk about four specific tribes, today. We also provide direct services, and
by that, I mean we have federal-uniform police officers and criminal investigators working
in 24 police departments across the U.S. They are responsible for enforcing not only tribal
law, in those communities, but also federal law. That's all at the request of the tribes,
and that's because of the trust responsibility that the U.S. government has to tribes.
For this presentation, we'll start the story at the time when we were asked to take part
in a Presidential initiative, originally called the President's "High-Priority Performance
Goal Initiative," later referred to as the "Safe Indian Communities Initiative." Essentially,
it was a challenge by the President to reduce violent crime in Indian Country over a 24-month
period of time, at the four most violent reservations throughout the U.S. We were asked to do this
in collaboration and in partnership with tribal communities. We were asked to bring our folks,
law enforcement partners, our tribal court partners, and social services partners together,
to develop a comprehensive strategy to attack the problem. And we did that.
If you'll go to the Safe Indian Communities...there you go. Thank you so much.
So that was our challenge, at the beginning. This was about three years ago. I wanted to
provide a little context about the Agency, and our capabilities at that point in time.
We were, essentially, an organization with little to no technology. Historically, and
because we had to, many times decisions were made with inaccurate, incomplete, or anecdotal
information. We did the best with what we had, but we were a paper-based organization.
Our crime data and crime reports were captured in paper format. They were captured in paper
format up until about April of this year. But they weren't regularly analyzed. It's
very difficult to do that, when your files are spread out across multiple agencies, and
so we didn't use them in a proactive way to develop any strategies to address the crime
problems.
So we were a very reactive organization. Our folks came when people dialed 911, when they
called us, but it wasn't always immediate. Sometimes it took, there are stories of it
taking several minutes to several hours for an officer to arrive on a scene. The root
cause of that main issue was a lack of personnel. We did not have an adequate number of officers
to actually serve the community that we were in. So we had to address that.
But one thing was clear. The goal and the challenge, provided to us through the president's
office, reduced crime by five percent, over a 24-month period of time at five reservations.
That was very clear. And it was something that we could communicate easily to our personnel,
and was something that everyone could rally around, and get behind. And that's going to
be important, later.
What seemed simple enough, for us, in reporting a change to the crime rate, was raised to
a new level when we began to have to present and to provide that information to the Secretary
of Interior, the Office of Management and Budget, the White House and, ultimately, the
President.
How confident were we in that process for collecting that information? Could it withstand
scrutiny? We knew there would be scrutiny if we failed, or if we succeeded, in this
initiative. Did we have a baseline on which to measure our success? And five percent is
a very small number. So was it even within the statistical margin of error? We didn't
know. We weren't really sure about that. But it was very important that we looked at and
provided a process to ensure that our data was accurate.
At this point in time, I want to take a quick sidebar to give you some background on what
uniform crime reporting is. I'll call it UCR. I'll get into exactly what it is, but that's
the methodology by which we report crime, and I'll tell you why it's important.
Essentially, in 1929, a methodology was developed to standardize crime reporting. There was
a need for uniform, reliable crime statistics, across the nation, and there was no way of
doing it at that point in time.
In 1930, the FBI actually took on the job, to collect and publish and archive that information
on behalf of law enforcement. Today, about 17,000 law enforcement agencies submit crime
statistics and crime reports to the FBI. They bundle that into a document that they call,
"Crime in the United States."
Producing accurate crime data requires a number of things. The first thing that we realized
is that it takes individuals trained in this methodology, in the uniform crime reporting
definitions. What are the definitions of ***? What are the definitions of ***, aggravated
assault, etc.?
What that requires when you are in a paper-based system, is people reading every report narrative,
to understand what's in there, and compare those with the standard definitions. Many
IT systems that do this, called records management systems, actually do that on the back end.
We did not have that available to us at that point in time.
To complicate matters further, each tribe has its own criminal code. As is familiar
to many of you, you may receive a ticket in the state of Maryland, or in the state of
Virginia, because Virginia and Maryland, they actually have their own laws. Well, the states
where these Indian reservations reside also have a state code. The federal code also applies.
So there are multiple codes and multiple crimes that someone could be charged with, in Indian
country.
The translation, the thing that we have to do as we report this, is to take the different
charges available to us and translate them into a standard definition. So if you'll go
to the next slide, I want to talk about what they are. I've got an example here.
Essentially, we are worried about part one crimes. Those are the most serious crimes.
You don't need to know what the definition of a part one crime is, but it's ***, aggravated
assault, the most violent crimes. That's what we were measured on, is decreasing violent
crime by five percent.
Now, I wanted to provide an example. These are the charges that we saw in one tribal
community, for example. Someone could be charged with battery. Or someone could be charged
with elder abuse, or spousal abuse, or domestic violence, or child abuse or disorderly conduct.
One of those or any of those, or a multiple of those. Our folks had to read that narrative
and decide whether that was a part one crime that we were going to be judged upon, which
would be aggravated assault. Or whether that was a...other than part one crime, which is
a simple assault.
So, that exercise is understanding the extent of the injuries that the victim received.
So, if there was a simple fight and someone punched another person, if they received bodily
injury or a contusion or a bruise, something to that extent, it would be simple assault.
If it was more serious and it required stitches or internal injuries or broken bones, that
would be serious bodily injury and that would be considered an aggravated assault.
Why is that important? We are operational personnel. We wanted to be focused on finding
the strategies to go out and attack the crime problem. What we realized is, we actually
had to evaluate the training of our own personnel, who were looking at these crime reports and
reporting the statistics up to us and eventually to the FBI.
Now, the interesting thing is that we had to ensure the transparency of this process,
and it was kind of a lesson learned. You want to build integrity into that system. You don't
want the people who are going to be held accountable for achieving these results, you don't want
them actually doing your analysis of each crime report.
Because the perverse incentive is to say, well, is this really serious bodily injury?
For this one, maybe it's not. Maybe this is not as serious as I think it is. So we actually
had to separate that process and ensure that there was an insulated wall there, so that
the people that were doing the accountability, doing the reporting, were not the same ones
who were going to be held responsible for achieving results.
So, what we recognized is that we couldn't do it alone. We needed some help. We needed
some help training our people, we needed some help in understanding how to do this. So,
we knew that we had to develop some deeper relationships with a number of partners in
the area, such as the FBI.
The FBI actually is the steward of this process. So we reached out to them to say how could
you help us. Well, the first thing that they wanted to do is bring the VIA personnel down
and provide some training. So we signed up and all went down for four days of training
on the uniform crime reporting. We sent six people down, and on the fourth day, we began
to gather people in this room.
So unit chiefs, and section chiefs and all kinds of people at the FBI began to take an
interest in what we were doing, and we all began to strategize. How could we actually
do this together? We had the Bureau of Justice statistics there. We had the FBI's Uniform
Crime Reporting Group there. Four of the most senior experts that the FBI had in UCR. Collectively,
we came up with a strategy to go out and send these collaborative teams, these joint teams,
to each reservation and by hand read and review and classify and score every single report
for the baseline.
Throughout the process, we actually developed a process, a set of tools and a methodology
essentially, internal methodology for doing this, and we maintained that throughout the
two-year initiative so that we could eliminate and minimize the introduction of any variance
in any of our crime numbers.
So overall, we had more than 20 FBI personnel involved. Many people from the BIA and several
from the Bureau of Justice statistics. So, collaboration with partners was absolutely
key in ensuring that the data was accurate and that we could withstand scrutiny that
actually did come with the achievement of any results.
So, while the team was focused on figuring out the crime reporting piece, our operations
personnel was actually looking at trying to analyze information and data that we had collected
in paper format to gain any insights on where the crimes were occurring. Who was actually
committing the crimes? Who are they communicating with? Are they operating in groups? We had
to understand that so that we could develop a plan or strategy to strategically deploy
our resources to the highest area of threat.
We also realized that we're not going to arrest our way out of this problem. The jails aren't
big enough. It's not solving the problem. So we had to get creative in how we did that.
So part of this initiative, as I read in the beginning, we were challenged with developing
a comprehensive strategy bringing together everyone that was a stakeholder that had a
piece in this. Social services, prosecution courts, law enforcement partners, tribal leaders,
the community. We all came together to better understand the individual community's crime
problems and developed a comprehensive strategy from there. We were definitely stronger together
than any of us were acting alone.
The first issue that we knew we had to address was the shortage of personnel. If you'll go
to the next line it's got the numbers there. As I mentioned, we were a purely reactive
organization. We had no ability to do detailed analysis on what our crime problems were.
Because of that, again, we're not responding to crime. When you don't respond to crime,
people stop calling. When people stop calling, crime goes unreported and you don't know about
it. They don't trust the police to actually solve their problems, they solve them themselves.
So, what we had to do is we had to increase the funding for each of these four agencies
that were part of this initiative so that we could hire enough officers to get us to
just an average number of police officers per thousand resident population that exists
in rural America. The FBI has those statistics. That's what we used as a benchmark for those
numbers. Because hiring takes a significant amount of time in the Federal government,
we developed some innovative partnerships with the law enforcement agencies across the
Department of the Interior.
We brought all of them in at some point in time or another to help backfill these officers
as we were going through the hiring process. We also reached out to tribes who had special
law enforcement commissions that could operate in other tribal communities and they helped
as well. Our goal was to just supplement those officers until the agencies were sustainable
with that average number of officers per thousand resident population.
We also looked to the industry for best practices. We did not want to reinvent the wheel with
this. We wanted to look at what was working. What were some proven crime strategies that
were working in America, around the US, and in communities around the US?
What we found was community policing was key to our success. We implemented the community
policing philosophy at each of these locations. We also used several other strategies that
were proven successful, such as DUI checkpoints and saturation patrol. They were all implemented
within their local context.
Lastly, what I want to say about this is that we instituted regular performance reviews.
So, we met every week to talk with each of the groups, each of the reservations. We reviewed
their data and their crime reports and their success in any of their initiatives, and their
performance against our goal. We shared ideas and best practices amongst one another and
we all learned together.
You can go to the next slide. I'm proud to say that we did not just achieve the five
percent that we were challenged with. We actually achieved a 35 percent reduction in violent
crime across these four reservations. This was on average, so some had higher than 35
percent, but we actually had one that had an increase of seven percent.
With scrutiny comes a need to understand. We had to look a little deeper to understand
what the issue was here. What we learned through a more detailed analysis was that, essentially,
crime spiked as we began to respond to the calls for service. The community began to
trust the police. They knew that we would come out.
When we began to respond, they began to report. Some of the crimes were previously unreported,
we found. So, we saw an increase, but overall, we began to see a decrease in crime. But we
weren't able to overcome that first year increase.
We went back and interviewed personnel. What we found was, during those interviews, citizens
actually felt safer in that community, even though it was showing an increase of crime
by seven percent at the end of that.
Fear of crime was less. Trust in police was up. People trusted that when they called the
police we would come and we would take care of the problem. That was a win in and of itself.
That helped us understand that context a little bit better.
To be completely honest, though, we also wrestled with a couple of things internally. One of
the things that we wrestled with was being held accountable to achieving a result that
we didn't have complete control over.
Crime is a social ill. There's a lot written on our ability or inability as a society to
address it. We can't just get crime to zero and we know that. Many people thought we shouldn't
be measured on that.
We decided this was the business that we were in and there was value in measuring that.
Even though we didn't have complete control over it, if we developed partnerships and
collaborated with the community, we would have an increased ability to impact it.
Towards the end of this initiative, the Department of Interior and BIA began the implementation
of an information system, a records management system called IMARS. IMARS would digitize
all of our crime reports that were previously in paper format.
We just went live in April and May across all of our agencies with IMARS. We're now
seeing more than 3000 crime reports put into that system every month. We now have the ability
to analyze information and crime data much more quickly. Our cycle time in looking at
what the crime problem is to deploying resources strategically has dramatically decreased.
We also established program analyst positions in our district offices. We trained them on
the system on IMARS and we sent them to crime analyst training. These are the same personnel
that were actually trained in the uniform crime reporting methodology we talked about
earlier and have experience in reviewing the crime reports as part of the initiative.
We have only scratched the surface on exploiting the information we're now capturing electronically.
The Director can now look at and get a report on every crime report that was entered into
the system within the last 24 hours, or 48 hours, or seven days, or whatever he wants,
actually. We've never been able to have access to that information in the BIA.
It has also increased the organization's desire and appetite for more data and deeper analysis.
The implementation of this information system has not been trouble free, that's for sure.
It's been a bumpy road.
The key to this was actually assigning an executive responsible for overseeing its implementation
within our own organization. Executive engagement and buy in was absolutely critical. It was
also critical to have key leadership personnel in the field champion the implementation of
the system.
Finally, I want to take a step up and briefly touch on our progress at the corporate level.
We've talked about the initiative, originally, no information system. We talked about implementing
an IT system to help us to deal with that data and to analyze it.
Now I want to take a step back to the corporate level within the Office of Justice Services
and talk about what we've done as an organization in implementing its first ever strategic plan.
Last year we implemented the balances scorecard methodology, if you're familiar with that.
We brought our whole, entire leadership team together and we established a set of strategic
objectives, goals, performance measures to help us understand how we're achieving our
mission, and a set of prioritized initiatives. We also implemented an IT system that would
help us to capture and manage that strategy management process throughout the organization.
We're still working on making a transition from just capturing the right information
to using data, and using the analysis of data, to make decisions and draw strategies as part
of our everyday management practices. We're still working on that.
In the next few weeks, we're going to take a step in looking at our strategic plan. We're
going to review everything. We're going to refresh the plan to ensure that we're still
measuring the right things and it's still relevant to our organization.
If you'll show the next slide, this is the strategy map that we developed, there. This
is the organization strategy map with our mission, our goals, objectives, et cetera.
What I'd like to cover at this point in time is some key takeaways.
I've taken you on our journey. I've told the story about where we've been. I want to, at
this point in time, leave you with a few takeaways that I hope are valuable to you and bring
this back into your organization.
If you'll go to the next slide. The first thing that...We were telling a story here.
Every agency collects information that can help tell your story. You just have to find
it and you have to put it in the right format, and you've got to find a venue to tell it.
The next thing that we learned was that when you set out to have a goal, and when you're
given a goal, the best goals or objectives are well-framed and clearly articulated. They're
simple and they can be understood at every level of the organization.
The first step is data collection. We were collecting the data. We weren't doing much
with it. We've now begun to take that information, analyze it and use it to drive decisions and
to drive strategy. We call it intelligence led policing. You may call it something else,
but that's how we're using our data.
The fourth point that I wanted to make here is that sometimes when you don't have an IT
system, or tools, data analysis has to be done the old-fashioned way, by hand. Doing
things by hand can still yield results and improve performance. We've proven that in
this case.
The next point that I wanted to leave you with is that you don't have to reinvent the
wheel. Look what's out there in your industry. What are the proven strategies?
We implemented some proven strategies in policing that were proven successful in large and small
communities throughout the US -- community policing, hotspot policing, targeted patrol.
What are your best practices or proven strategies that you can bring in?
Next slide. I didn't invent this, but I've taken it and used it. What gets measured gets
managed, and what gets managed gets improved. We have seen that time and time again. If
you're measuring something and you're asking people about it and you're actively managing
it, you're ultimately going to improve it, if you're focused on it.
Our next takeaway was that you don't have to have complete control over your outcome
to track and to impact them. Crime was key here. The crime rate was key here, for us.
There is value in doing it, but there is also value in collaborating, which brings me to
my next point.
Any success that we achieved during the HPBG Initiative, or the Safe Indian Communities
Initiative, required partnerships and collaboration. We had to reach out to our partners. We had
to reach out to those we haven't traditionally reach out to and build those relationships.
In our context, reaching out to the community was a difficult thing, but co-producing public
safety is an imperative in our world.
The next point that I'd like to leave you with is that success in an analytic program
requires leadership commitment and champions throughout the organization. Our leadership
was onboard. We had people that were champions throughout our District Offices.
That was a key to ensuring that we maintained focus on that goal and that we ultimately
improved, and, from the IT perspective, that the uptake in the system that had some significant
issues, that we continued to ride that out.
My next point is that the road to infusing analytics throughout your agency is a marathon
and not a sprint. Start small. Consider a pilot, as we did, and scale from there. There
is value in just taking that first step.
We were an organization that was completely paper based three years ago. We've made phenomenal
changes between now and then. Some of that was because we were forced to take that first
step. I would encourage you to do that.
The next step is actually a little nuanced on the IT side. If you're going from a paper
based system to an IT system, don't underestimate the time and effort required to think through
your analytic needs.
Because we weren't capturing any information, we weren't really analyzing it in the paper
format. Now that we're capturing it electronically, as I said, the appetite has increased in the
agency for new ways of slicing and dicing the information. That flows back to the system.
There are non-required fields that people want to analyze and slice and dice their data
on today that we just have to make a policy change to make this a required field now.
Had there been some forethought ahead of time we would have done a better job at anticipating
some of the analytical needs.
I just wanted to make sure that if you're going from a non-IT world to an IT world that
you don't underestimate that requirement. Next slide.
This is my final slide here. I said this already, but once data is available, the appetite for
more insights from the data exponentially increases. You should be ready for that. We're
dealing with that now. We have more demands for analysis than we have people to do it
and capability to do it at this point, which is a very good thing.
The next point is, even perceived failures, our seven percent increase in crime that we
saw on one reservation, created an opportunity to better understand the deeper context that
we may have missed. People began to report crimes that were previously unreported or
under-reported.
That's a big thing in policing. Citizens felt safer. They had more faith in police and they
started calling. That was very important for us and we would have missed that completely
had we not had this opportunity with the seven percent increase in one reservation.
Data analytics is the catalyst for becoming a learning organization. We now are looking
internally at ourselves to, how do we get better? How do we learn from what we've understood
with the analysis? It is a fundamental change in our mindset and we're seeing that take
hold.
The last two points are that investment in technology and personnel who can use it can
expedite your organization's maturity in data analytics. We have seen that. We have just
started that piece of our journey, but we're looking forward to seeing our progress in
two to three years.
Finally, even the most well thought out and designed strategies need to be reassessed
from time to time. Circumstances change. The focus of the organization may change. We're
going through a refresh in the next couple of weeks with our strategic plan. The performance
measures that drive your strategy have to continue to be relevant to the organization.
As I said in the beginning of this discussion, we're still at the beginning. We're still
maturing in our journey. I hope something that we touched on today would be valuable
to you and would help you in your own journey to be more data driven.
It's been an honor for me to speak to you today, and at this point in time I'd like
to turn it back over to Larry to see if there are any questions.
Please, grab that chair over here. Thank you.
You're welcome.
All right. Oh it does work, excellent.
Hi, again my name is Larry Gillick. The easiest way to get questions to us from the field
is by sending an email to the email address that's already in your inboxes, but I'll read
it out to you anyway in case you've gotten here without that link.
It's Lawrence, lawrence.gillickjr@opm.gov. OPM and my mom are the only two folks in the
world that still use the Jr., but that's neither here nor there.
Now, why did we bring on Michael? One reason, he is a wiz with this kind of work, but beyond
that it's the White House's high priority performance goals.
BIAs work in law enforcement in reducing violent crime in Indian country with specifically
named there.
If you wouldn't mind, tell us how that impacted either your work or your ability to get the
job done. Sometime having a voice from a higher place is not a bad thing in anyone's line
of work.
You're absolutely right. I think the requirement for us to develop a strategy, a comprehensive
strategy, and the requirement or accountability for articulating what that strategy is. Even
though it is forced upon us, it's the right thing to do. It's the right way to go about
our business.
I think through the HPPG initiative it forced us into a deeper analysis, deeper understanding
of our own information. It really was the catalyst, I think, for us beginning this journey
of data analytics.
We just have historically been under resourced from a technology perspective. We don't have
a lot of IT personnel who are able to go in and wrestle with that information or analyze
it in any way.
Thumbing through paper reports to try to figure out what to do is a daunting task. There's
nothing like a Presidential Initiative to spur you on.
Well, thank you. One common question has been coming in, either live or through emails.
Everybody asks it. What does this do to help me basically? Everyone in the field is asking
that same question. You do law enforcement.
How do I apply the lessons of analytics to whatever my job is, and there are many, to
make this work for someone else?
Well, it's all about performance management. At the end of the day, when you boil it down,
we all have a mission. Our mission happens to be law enforcement. You know exactly what
your mission is.
We had to figure out a way to judge whether we were achieving our mission. Performance
measures, in the bigger context, that's how we do it. We established performance measures
to gauge our success in achieving the mission. If I understand your question right, that
is what's driven us to where we are today.
Repeat your question again, because I want to make sure I get the nuance.
Sure. Imagine an HR professional is asking, now, "Why am I listening?"
[laughter]
That's putting it, maybe, overly bluntly, but your lesson is from law enforcement. How
does someone in human resources, or any other division, any other piece of federal government,
apply this sort of lesson.
OK. Essentially, we had to stop and say, what's important to us? What are the performance
measures that we think are important. Once we developed those, we had to continue to
manage those.
That process is where you start. If you're an HR organization, then the time it takes
to get someone recruited and in the door may be something that's valuable for you to measure.
If you measure that, and that's one of your performance measures, and you regularly discuss
it, and you manage that, then you can improve your performance as an HR organization, by
decreasing that time that someone gets recruited to the time that you can get them in the door
and productive for the organization.
Ours just happened to be, were we able to impact the crime rate, for example, by strategically
deploying personnel. Each individual agency has to look at, what it is that drives their
business, and how would they measure their performance, and then continue to relentlessly
manage that.
How about a question from the room?
Thanks, Michael, for that presentation. It was really good. My question is, in the beginning
you mentioned that the five percent decrease was BIA's goal, but it was, in reality, clearly
going to be a community effort, to be sure that that was accomplished. How did you engage
the community in helping you to reach that goal?
Part of the community policing philosophy is about community engagement. We created
these multi-disciplinary teams, MDTs we called them. We did, and we're doing them now, with
two new reservations, but we'll do community assessments, where we assess every service
available to the community and to us as the agency in charge of this initiative.
Through that, we identify points of contact, and invite them together in these multi-disciplinary
teams. We bring in community members, we engage tribal leaders, and we talk about the crime
problems that exist in this neighborhood or that neighborhood. Collectively, we develop
the strategy together.
You've got to create a forum where there is conversation. You've got to identity the right
people to be at the table. It's about co-producing public safety. This is not a law-enforcement-only
initiative. It's not really our job alone. It has to be the community's job. If the community
is tired of the crime problem, then they also have a role in standing up and saying, "We
are not going to take this anymore." Or, "We're going to lend our resources."
We think about alternatives to just putting our people in jail. Are there ways that may
more successfully address the root cause of the problem, prevention strategies. How can
we bring them to the table, and actually impact the root cause of the crime problem, to begin
with? So, it's those multi-disciplinary teams that were the key for us. in developing that
comprehensive strategy.
Good question.
I have one more question. What exactly did the champion do? What practical things did
he do to be sure this was a success?
The champion?
The champion of the effort. You said that there was a champion that you all had?
Well, our director was actually the single largest champion, so the Director of the Office
of Justice Services. I can talk from an IT perspective, which is where we saw this. The
IMARS implementation has been a DOI project that has been ongoing for a number of years.
I won't go into the details of it. But essentially the White House got involved, OMB got involved,
and actually said, "We've got to roll this out, and here's the aggressive schedule that
we're going to do this." We have rolled out a commercial off-the-shelf system that's a
records management system from a vendor that was selected.
Very little configuration was done on it to change that or to conform that package to
our own business processes. The aggressive timeframe actually also required the roll-out
before we had any of our criminal codes in there, for example, or anything to make the
system tailored to our own user experience.
So we had a black eye as management in that we're forcing the roll-out of the system that's
really not ready for prime time. The vendor had a black eye because they would never choose
to have their system rolled out in this fashion. The users were actually hurting because it
was actually taking them more time to do their job, so recipe for disaster.
But, because of leadership engagement and belief that the system would meet our needs,
we just needed to continue to solve the problems. At the very top, our director was bought-in
to that concept and led us through that.
So through a number of meetings and through personal interaction and just through his
persevering and encouragement through the process, he championed us through the dark
times there. We also had folks that were trainers that were out in the field. They were giving
training to 20 people at a time. They were the spokespeople, for lack of a better term,
for this system and for that roll-out.
They really played a part in being positive about the change to this organization. The
value of us being able to do any data analysis at the end of the day. Crime strategies are
built around our ability to understand who's doing it, where they're doing it, when they're
doing it so we can go and proactively be there or chase them down. There was phenomenal opportunity
there if we would get our information in the system.
So that's where we saw the champions really stepping up and helping us as an organization
go through the very difficult times. We're past that now, and you can see in the numbers
that we talked about, 3,000 incidents put into the system every month. We're continuing.
Fifty or greater percent every month we're increasing, so something's working there.
For those folks who may think of the giant spreadsheet that this all would be with a
certain mind-numbing attention, you are using other tools besides [indecipherable 0:46:24]
columns, yes? Visualization tools maybe? Mapping?
The plan is, yes, to use some visualization and mapping capability. We've had some pilot
projects, where we've given our data to some other government agencies who helped us with
that. A next phase of this is definitely a geo mapping capability, but right now, we're
not using that to its fullest extent, if at all.
It depends on each district office, and the analyst that's responsible there. Some are
doing more than others at this point in time, but it's not because we've given them the
whole suite of tools there. We're still in the middle of roll-out, and additional capabilities
are coming through the system implementation.
You had mentioned earlier, last we talked, some software that you were using, that is
the same as the software city police chiefs might be using. I'm not asking for endorsement,
I'm asking more, how did you wind up picking and choosing, and is it all working the way
you expected it to?
There are three basic systems that a law enforcement agency would have -- a computer-aided dispatch
or CAD system, a records management system, RMS, which is what IMARS is, and a case management
system, which would help investigators in managing their investigations, all the documents
associated with it.
We have implemented a records management system. We, through a number of years, provided requirements
to the Department of Interior, but the procurement process, selection of the vendor, was all
handled by the Department of Interior. They wanted a standardized, one system for all
of the law enforcement bureaus within DOI. So IMARS is actually a records management
system for the Bureau of Land Management, for Fish and Wildlife Services, for the Bureau
of Indian Affairs, for the National Park Service, for all of the law enforcement bureaus.
We all operate a little differently, but a records management system is...it's a commodity
market in a way, for policing. And they all sort of have similar functionality. The key
to making it work in your organization is the time spent on configuration and the time
spent on configuring it to your own business process. We've been changing the tires on
the car while the car's moving, in this one. So we've been doing that configuration after
we've implemented the system.
Fantastic. Any other questions from the room? Checking for other questions from the field.
We do have one compliment, but I'll share that one offline.
OK.
At least one person thought it was cool. So, thank you. Anything else you'd like to leave
the folks who are either watching from home, teleworking, or from their offices, before
we go?
Just that, again, I would like to say, this is not about Michael Miller being up here
and taking the applause for any success. Again, it was a team effort. We're proud of the success
that we achieved, but we know that success, as we've talked about, depends completely
upon our ability to work with our tribal partners, with our other law enforcement partners, prosecutors,
all of the team that we built in.
We've got two new HPPG initiatives, two new tribes that we're bringing on as part of the
initiative staring this fiscal year. We're hoping to take the lessons we learned from
the four and apply them. And even take it to the next level at these next two. Stay
tuned for that.
The two new tribes are the San Carlos Apache tribe in Arizona and the Rosebud Sioux tribe.
I leave tomorrow to go to San Carlos where we're going to be talking about implementing
some of these innovative crime strategies with our partners there.
Fantastic. Perhaps you'll come back and visit with us again and report on hopefully, some
success of that.
I will.
All right, fantastic. Michael Miller from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Thank you for
your work and your teams work in reducing crime in Indian country through data and analytics,
I appreciate it.
Thank you so much. Thank you for attending.