FORT CARSON, Colo. -- The ability of garrison and unit commanders Armywide to ensure discipline in the force and safety in communities has now been bolstered by a new tool: a standardized crime statistics reporting template.
Working together since last August, a Community of Practice Standardization of Crime Statistics Working Group, comprised of law enforcement professionals from installations across the country, developed the template for breaking down and analyzing critical crime statistics. The group was formed as part of the Command Provost Marshal's 2012 Summer of Law Enforcement Improvement Campaign.
Fort Carson's Erin Hellmers, a police intelligence specialist with the Department of Emergency Services, who volunteered to participate in the working group, played a key role in the template's development.
"Every installation sees different types of crimes that are problems, and they may collect or report information differently," said Hellmers. "The goal of the group was to try and standardize some of those problems.
"The group was a forum to be able to ask questions of other installations on how they were doing things at their installations," said Hellmers. "Analysts from all the installations discussed how the reporting is done, how crime is captured, and, from that, determine what problems need to be tackled."
After developing a template for reporting categories of crimes that can pose problems at most installations, a challenge arose. Hellmers said the group posed the question, "How can we make it so each installation could put in their own unique crime problems that they're having?" In response to this challenge, the group incorporated the ability for installations to tailor the reporting mechanism to their individual issues.
"The template itself includes a chart that shows overall crime over the last five quarters, so you can see if it's trending up or down, and then it breaks it out into major offenses and secondary offenses," she said.
The template breaks down specific categories of crime, such as alcohol-related offenses, as well as results of commanders' actions on crime. The template incorporates focused analysis of top repeat offenders, which led the working group to update the repeat offender report that installation law enforcement was using.
"We focused on updating the repeat offender report because one of the things (commanders were) pushing was being able to try (to) identify high-risk Soldiers. It's very hard to do that. No one can successfully do that," said Hellmers. "But the closest way is by looking at repeat offenders, so we really wanted to make that report usable."
Toward the end of the development process, Hellmers was involved with building an automation component into the template, giving law enforcement professionals preparing the report a means to visually interpret statistics and trends quickly.
She met weekly via teleconference with the other core members of the working group, which included Ricky Rounds, former DES police intelligence specialist at Fort Hood, Texas, and current Directorate of Plans, Training Mobilization and Security chief of operations; Fort Bragg, N.C., Chief of Police Calvin Prouty; and Mike Chesbro, a criminal intelligence specialist at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash. All four were recognized this month as Installation Management Community Heroes of the Day. Their work is already making an impact at Fort Carson.
"We quadrupled the number of walking patrols at Fort Carson, based on the work that Erin did," said Lt. Col. Christopher Heberer, 759th Military Police Battalion commander and director of Emergency Services.
Much of police work is reactive, such as responding to a 911 call, he said, but added, "policing should be as proactive as possible."
In order to achieve that proactive state, Heberer stressed the importance of "understanding the criminal threat" via pattern analysis.
"What the Army has learned over the last 12 years in Iraq and Afghanistan is that intelligence drives all operations," Heberer said. He added that the "Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield" approach is applied at Fort Carson in the context of dealing with crime, and the crime statistics reporting template now plays a role in that approach.
"We can have our patrols correspond with our crime hot spots," Heberer said. Making changes such as these, as a result of the crime statistics reporting template, has amplified military police engagement.
Citing trends made clear in the new crime statistics reporting format, Heberer stressed that crime is down 11-18 percent overall from last year.
"Through our engagement with the community, our engagement with other units, we truly are improving the safety and security of Joint Task Force Fort Carson."
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