Photo by Erin Nelson. Starnes Media
Capt. Shane Ware, with Vestavia Hills Police, briefs the media as law enforcement with Vestavia Hills and Mountain Brook work the scene of a shooting at Saint Stephens Episcopal Church in Vestavia Hills where three people were shot Thursday, June 16, 2022. Photo by Erin Nelson.
The Vestavia Hills Police Department may soon be getting help from “criminal minds.”
Police Chief Shane Ware recently told the Vestavia Hills City Council he is considering a contract with an “investigative analyst service” that would provide background investigative support to help detectives track down suspects and solve crimes.
The service would use enhanced cellphone tracking, telephone analysis, facial recognition, social media analysis and monitoring, computer and digital forensic tools, open-source intelligence, and commercially available data to assist Vestavia Hills detectives and officers, Ware said.
He compared the potential service to the Penelope Garcia character on the “Criminal Minds” TV show. On the show, Garcia, played by Kirsten Vangsness, is a technical analyst for the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit who uses her computer and hacking skills to track down serial killers and other criminals.
“She can find anybody in two seconds,” Ware said.
Having an outside service conduct that kind of background work would be especially beneficial in major cases like the triple homicide at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Cahaba Heights in June 2022, Ware said.
In that case, police had the suspect in custody quickly, but generating and executing the search warrants took all night and into the next day, he said. The company being considered would be able to assist with producing more detailed search warrants, he said.
“It would keep our resources on the scene. All of our detectives would be on the scene,” Ware said. “It would save us a lot of time that we don’t have to spare in a situation like that. … It would be the ultimate force multiplier for us. It would be a real-time police analyst and would give us access to investigative tools we don’t have right now.”
Ware said writing effective search warrants for cellphone tower data can be especially difficult, as the parameters for such data change every 90 days.
“Nobody can stay on top of that,” he said. “No inside expert in the Police Department knows the best way to write that search warrant.”
The company Vestavia Hills is considering could help narrow search parameters from a 2-mile radius to a much tighter zone of about 450 to 500 feet, Ware said.
While the service comes at a cost, Ware said the department could likely offset some of the expense by eliminating maintenance contracts for other services that duplicate some of what the investigative analyst service would provide.
Hiring an in-house analyst would also be more complicated, he said. It would require going through the Jefferson County Personnel Board, which likely doesn’t even have a job description for a police investigative analyst, he said. A new description would have to be created, along with performance standards, and by the time someone is hired and trained, they might already be ready to leave for another job, Ware said.
“This is a far better system for us to outsource this type of service,” he said.
