Police needs software help with crime fighting
Private crime fighters are using sophisticated software to solve burglaries, hijackings and kidnapping cases, but the South African Police Service (SAPS) is still debating whether to install the system itself.
Forensic investigators working for Specialised Services Group (SSG) have also provided evidence to help numerous companies win civil prosecutions, said CEO Mitchell Graaff.
Yet despite the endorsement of Scotland Yard, the FBI and the London Transport Police, which already use Memex software to collate and assess evidence, SAPS was still debating it, he said.
SSG is working on 500 investigations, in what Graaff describes as “a bit of a quiet time”. The company paid R3m in licence fees to let 10 of its 45 investigators use the software, which was developed by Glasgow-based Memex. The SSG team includes former police inspectors, forensic experts, lawyers and a former prosecutor.
It also runs an armed response service for gated communities, and video tapes or written details showing suspicious vehicles or people in an area are fed into the Memex system. Its debt collection division also enters details of any debtors they are chasing.
When its team investigates a crime they add the details of stolen cellphones or vehicles, and scan in written witness statements, which can later be found via key-word searches.
All the data can be viewed in pictorial form, with links showing the numbers dialled on a stolen phone, banking transactions made by suspects, and details of other crime scenes where the same people or cars were spotted.
Though much of that information may exist in various databases used by the police, often those databases are not linked or the software cannot interrogate data stored in a separate places.
SSG works on the theory that there is a lot of crime but not necessarily a lot of criminals, so using software to link and confirm related incidents lets fewer officers solve more crimes more quickly.
The police often welcomed input from SSG when it was hired by a crime victim, said Graaff, but he said the SAPS must upgrade its own technology.
“We have had meetings with them and asked why they are dithering about whether to use it,” he said. “Why on earth do the top law enforcement agencies in the world use this and the SAPS doesn’t?”
SSG does not sell the system itself so it has nothing to gain financially if the police installed it, Graaff said.
The police did not respond to queries on the status of its software trials. SSG was hired by the family of kidnapped Leigh Matthews, and helped the police to find her body. It also worked on the Brett Kebble case when Durban Roodepoort Deep asked it to investigate irregularities.
Software for crime fighting – comments and discussion
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