Sacramento area neighborhoods go online to track crime
Published: Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 1A
Meet Robert Earl Randall, or "Bobby," as he is known to friends and police.
Randall, 44, has amassed a 12-page rap sheet that includes arrests on charges of burglary, driving under the influence, possession of controlled substances, impersonation, writing a phony prescription, receiving stolen property and taking a vehicle without permission.
Last week, found sleeping in a broken-down camper parked next to his mother's house off Opal Lane in the Hagginwood area, he was arrested again as a suspect in two additional burglaries.
"I'm not trying to be a criminal," Randall told Sacramento County sheriff's Sgt. Chris Joachim as he sat handcuffed the patrol car. "I don't want to go to prison."
Randall is one of the people you lock your doors against. But, increasingly, Sacramento-area residents are deciding that is not enough.
Some are turning to online crime-tracking tools or creating neighborhood watch groups on the Internet that give them instant access to crimes reported in their neighborhoods and suspicious activity.
Susanne Burns is one of them. The Carmichael resident decided she had to do something after her home was burglarized last May while her family slept.
The family had left vehicles in the driveway to make room for a pre-prom party in the garage. The burglars apparently broke into her husband's truck and used the garage door opener to get inside the garage and then the house.
When she discovered the burglary, Burns followed the traditional route, setting up a Neighborhood Watch group of homes in her gated community.
"We started emailing and this list grew basically out of control," she said. "It started with me emailing the 22 homes in our little community. It just mushroomed, and I think that's when it hit me."
"It" was the idea of harnessing Facebook. The result is Carmichael Watchgroup, a page on the social networking site that has 342 members and notifies residents of community meetings with the Sheriff's Department, crime-tracking websites and criminal reports.
News about stolen bikes, garage break-ins and other crimes are posted regularly. At Christmas, video from one home's security cameras was posted showing a burglar breaking into a house and leaving on a bicycle with stolen property.
Elsewhere, communities from Granite Bay to Natomas have set up email alerts to keep residents abreast of what is going on in their neighborhoods, and several area law enforcement agencies are contracting with companies to put crime data online and make it available to anyone for free.
Last week, Sacramento police announced they had signed a deal with CrimeReports.com, a Utah-based company that posts police reports to a searchable database.
"It'll give you instantaneous results every day," Sacramento Police Sgt. Norm Leong said.
The city is getting the service free for a year. Residents can sign up, type in their address and receive alerts to crimes reported in their area.
Greg Whisenant, founder of the 4-year-old company, said departments typically pay between $100 and $200 a month for the service and that more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies use it, including Auburn, Citrus Heights, Elk Grove and the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office.
SpotCrime.com offers a similar service on a site that also includes information from area news reports. "People want this data," founder Colin Drane said from company headquarters in Baltimore. "Getting it quickly to the public hopefully creates a positive effect in knowledge and reducing crime."
The field is intensely competitive. CrimeReports.com sued Drane's company in federal court last year, essentially accusing SpotCrime.com of stealing its information and posting it online as its own.
CrimeReports.com declared victory when the case was settled in December, but Drane says his company is being unfairly squeezed out by police agencies that provide data only to his competitor.
The dispute highlights how valuable the data have become, especially to neighborhood groups that rely on the services to know when break-ins are occurring and to law enforcement agencies whose budgets are being cut.
But it often takes old fashioned detective work to get suspects in jail.
Randall, the burglary suspect, had been caught on video breaking into an electronics store to steal flashlights and tool belts in January, according to sheriff's officials. The next night he allegedly backed his van into the roll-up metal door of a scooter store trying to gain entry.
Joachim figured the van would have been so damaged that it would be easy for his officers to spot. And that is, in fact, what ultimately led to Randall's arrest.
"That was kind of stupid," Randall told Joachim at the time of his arrest. "Yeah, I was looking for a bottle of whiskey or something, I don't even know."
With six detectives working property crimes for the Sheriff's Department, cases have to be triaged to determine which are worthy of investigation.
Last year, Joachim's division had nearly 18,000 crime reports filed, including 4,743 residential burglaries, 1,577 business break-ins and 2,820 vehicle burglaries.
Of those, 704 cases were assigned to detectives, and 211 suspects ended up being arrested. It may seem like a small number, but burglars tend to hit more than one target, and Joachim figures the multiplier effect for each suspect means he's solving numerous break-ins each time an arrest is made.
"If studies show 6 percent of the people commit 98 percent of the crime, then let's try to catch as many of those 6 percent as we can," Joachim said.
Randall, 44, has amassed a 12-page rap sheet that includes arrests on charges of burglary, driving under the influence, possession of controlled substances, impersonation, writing a phony prescription, receiving stolen property and taking a vehicle without permission.
Last week, found sleeping in a broken-down camper parked next to his mother's house off Opal Lane in the Hagginwood area, he was arrested again as a suspect in two additional burglaries.
"I'm not trying to be a criminal," Randall told Sacramento County sheriff's Sgt. Chris Joachim as he sat handcuffed the patrol car. "I don't want to go to prison."
Randall is one of the people you lock your doors against. But, increasingly, Sacramento-area residents are deciding that is not enough.
Some are turning to online crime-tracking tools or creating neighborhood watch groups on the Internet that give them instant access to crimes reported in their neighborhoods and suspicious activity.
Susanne Burns is one of them. The Carmichael resident decided she had to do something after her home was burglarized last May while her family slept.
The family had left vehicles in the driveway to make room for a pre-prom party in the garage. The burglars apparently broke into her husband's truck and used the garage door opener to get inside the garage and then the house.
When she discovered the burglary, Burns followed the traditional route, setting up a Neighborhood Watch group of homes in her gated community.
"We started emailing and this list grew basically out of control," she said. "It started with me emailing the 22 homes in our little community. It just mushroomed, and I think that's when it hit me."
"It" was the idea of harnessing Facebook. The result is Carmichael Watchgroup, a page on the social networking site that has 342 members and notifies residents of community meetings with the Sheriff's Department, crime-tracking websites and criminal reports.
News about stolen bikes, garage break-ins and other crimes are posted regularly. At Christmas, video from one home's security cameras was posted showing a burglar breaking into a house and leaving on a bicycle with stolen property.
Elsewhere, communities from Granite Bay to Natomas have set up email alerts to keep residents abreast of what is going on in their neighborhoods, and several area law enforcement agencies are contracting with companies to put crime data online and make it available to anyone for free.
Last week, Sacramento police announced they had signed a deal with CrimeReports.com, a Utah-based company that posts police reports to a searchable database.
"It'll give you instantaneous results every day," Sacramento Police Sgt. Norm Leong said.
The city is getting the service free for a year. Residents can sign up, type in their address and receive alerts to crimes reported in their area.
Greg Whisenant, founder of the 4-year-old company, said departments typically pay between $100 and $200 a month for the service and that more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies use it, including Auburn, Citrus Heights, Elk Grove and the El Dorado County Sheriff's Office.
SpotCrime.com offers a similar service on a site that also includes information from area news reports. "People want this data," founder Colin Drane said from company headquarters in Baltimore. "Getting it quickly to the public hopefully creates a positive effect in knowledge and reducing crime."
The field is intensely competitive. CrimeReports.com sued Drane's company in federal court last year, essentially accusing SpotCrime.com of stealing its information and posting it online as its own.
CrimeReports.com declared victory when the case was settled in December, but Drane says his company is being unfairly squeezed out by police agencies that provide data only to his competitor.
The dispute highlights how valuable the data have become, especially to neighborhood groups that rely on the services to know when break-ins are occurring and to law enforcement agencies whose budgets are being cut.
But it often takes old fashioned detective work to get suspects in jail.
Randall, the burglary suspect, had been caught on video breaking into an electronics store to steal flashlights and tool belts in January, according to sheriff's officials. The next night he allegedly backed his van into the roll-up metal door of a scooter store trying to gain entry.
Joachim figured the van would have been so damaged that it would be easy for his officers to spot. And that is, in fact, what ultimately led to Randall's arrest.
"That was kind of stupid," Randall told Joachim at the time of his arrest. "Yeah, I was looking for a bottle of whiskey or something, I don't even know."
With six detectives working property crimes for the Sheriff's Department, cases have to be triaged to determine which are worthy of investigation.
Last year, Joachim's division had nearly 18,000 crime reports filed, including 4,743 residential burglaries, 1,577 business break-ins and 2,820 vehicle burglaries.
Of those, 704 cases were assigned to detectives, and 211 suspects ended up being arrested. It may seem like a small number, but burglars tend to hit more than one target, and Joachim figures the multiplier effect for each suspect means he's solving numerous break-ins each time an arrest is made.
"If studies show 6 percent of the people commit 98 percent of the crime, then let's try to catch as many of those 6 percent as we can," Joachim said.
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