Database software helps find 'Bedroom Rapist'
When the man known as the "Bedroom Rapist" began
terrorizing Toronto in June, police girded themselves for
a big investigation.
By September 13 the rapist had broken into 12 homes during
the early hours of the morning, sexually assaulting or raping
female victims as young as five and as old as 75.
Sometimes he would steal a few things. Then he would slip
away before dawn. "He was getting a taste for it,"
said Toronto police Sgt. Jim Muscat.
But police were getting a taste for the rapist, too. After
being dogged by accusations of having bungled a previous serial
rape and murder case, police departments in metropolitan Toronto
banded together to create a multi-jurisdictional task force.
And this time the officers had a huge advantage, a networked
computer system armed with investigative database software
developed in the Miss Marple setting of an old manor house
at Barrington near Cambridge.
The Toronto police quickly got their man.
No-one is more delighted by the above case study than Richard
Mills, product manager at Xanalys, the Barrington company
that came up with the goods.
A former chief inspector of police at the Home Office, Mr
Mills was a young PC on the notorious Yorkshire Ripper case
and remembers how months and years of investigation were wasted
going up blind alleys — byways that would now be impossible
with the advent of PowerCase, the Xanalys catch-all software.
PowerCase manages every piece of information attached to
a case, organises the workflow and provides a logical and
effective methodology for solving crimes. It is especially
suited to sex cases and predator crime, Mr Mills says, and
its crowning glory is its ability automatically to produce
a case file at the end of each investigation, cutting out
huge amounts of pre-trial paperwork for the police.
The Canadian police are proving the most enthusiastic adopters
of PowerCase and have already spent millions arming their
forces with it. In the UK, Warwickshire is covered, and parts
of the U.S. are up to speed. Mr Mills says the potential worldwide
market is worth billions. Xanalys is a spin-out from Global
Graphics, the company that bought Harlequin when it was on
its knees. Harlequin had done all the groundwork, but went
on to sink all its success into devising a new computer language,
an endeavour that ruined the business.
Meanwhile, PowerCase was about to come into its own, and
as well as offering police forces around the world an invaluable
tool, it is also being adopted by the financial community
and health authorities, in one case helping to find the source
of an e-coli epidemic in Canada.
Mr Mills says PowerCase is the most advanced system of its
kind in the world. It costs £50,000 for a five-user
system that will support up to 30 detectives. The Government
has just released £650 million to be spent on document
management within the police, and Xanalys, whose PowerCase
component "Watson" is already used by 30 per cent
of UK forces, is in a good position to increase its market.
"I hope we do," says Mr Mills. "PowerCase
could seriously raise the crime-solving rate in serious crime.
It is all about doing common things uncommonly well.
"I love to see software tackling difficult problems,"
he adds, "but the intuition in solving cases will always
be in the interview room." Even so, in Canada, prosecution
cases are now "damaged" in court if PowerCase has
not been used to manage the investigation.
Article reproduced courtesy of Cambridge Newspapers Ltd.
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