“We wanted to make a difference”, said StreetCred co-founder and CEO, Nick Selby. Selby, a long-time figure in the information security industry was sworn in as a Dallas-area police officer in 2010. Selby first met in 2008 with co-founder and veteran police officer, Dave Henderson, who has nabbed over 600 violent felony criminals in more than 15-years in law enforcement.
Four years later, together, they founded StreetCred, a technology-based data analytics solution for use in law enforcement. With over 1.8 million outstanding warrants in New York City alone, followed closely by 120,000 in Chicago and 70,000 in Los Angeles, resource-drained officers are swimming in mountains of inefficient paperwork and are greatly outnumbered by the number of warrants they must act on. It’s law enforcements equivalent to an understaffed SOC trying to determine which incidents to respond to first after manually collecting data. How can the law enforcement system become more efficient and prioritize efforts to make StreetCred’s vision of “making a difference,” a reality?
Selby, Henderson, and their team, have built a never-been-done-before solution to change the way law enforcement manages antiquated databases. Behind their leadership, StreetCred is backed by full-time developers, sales, and business operations personnel.
Their innovation has attracted investments from 2M Companies and includes a professional advisory board. StreetCred has gained attention from media outlets, technical publications, and law enforcement agencies. Not only are law enforcement officials more efficient, StreetCred’s data analytics system helps safeguard the brave men and women protecting our streets. StreetCred brings disparate systems and backlogs of paperwork into the 21st century for law enforcement to locate criminals and bring them to justice.
Selby explained the amount of time law enforcement spends sitting behind a desk and manually entering the same data into multiple green screen systems can take upwards of 4 out of 5 days of their work week. This translates to 80% of the officer’s time spent on clerical work as opposed to patrolling the streets, apprehending criminals.
To make matters worse, after all of the time spent behind a desk data to locate a person of interest may be inaccurate. Up to 70% of the physical addresses are wrong, he said. In addition, inaccurate data has led officers to incorrect addresses and in fact, at times, the person of interest is actually deceased. StreetCred has been able to reduce inaccurate data and inefficient repetitive typing by creating a central portal with the ability to drill-down on the data with just one click.
StreetCred’s data analytics engine is able to analyze over 100 questions in seconds so an officer can act on the warrant. StreetCred helps answer the following and many more if-then critical questions:
- Is the person alive or dead?
- Is the person already in jail?
- Where does the person live?
- What do they look like now as well as past arrest photos?
- Are they violent?
- Are they in a gang?
- What make and model car do they drive?
This is the type of data law enforcement has at their fingertips. With just a few clicks they now get a 360-degree view of the person. Also, StreetCred provides return on investment reporting metrics for:
- How much money is outstanding in warrants?
- How much money has been collected as a result of using StreetCred?
- How much time are officers saving through the use of StreetCred?
- What is the average time to apprehend once the warrant is issued?
- Are there other backlogs at different parts of the process such as court or processing, which create additional inefficiencies?
- The order in which officers should pursue criminals?
It should be made very clear that individuals in StreetCred only exist if there is a warrant out for their arrest. StreetCred aggregates, streamlines and analyzes data from the judicial systems, which already input the data into disparate systems throughout the country.
The end result is a law enforcement portal centralizing data from multiple systems. Law enforcement data can be sensitive, and there are federal and state oversight and security regimes in place to protect it.
StreetCred takes its stewardship of this data seriously and has worked with state agencies and external security companies to architect and test its information security program. While no business is impenetrable, StreetCred has involved many leading security experts and enterprise-grade solutions to uphold their duty to protect. Immunity, Inc., TrustedSec, White Hat Security and many more from the security community, provide StreetCred with knowledgeable and trustworthy strategic and tactical services to protect systems and intellectual property.
StreetCred’s mission to bring safety, accuracy, and efficiencies to a manual, broken process continues to develop. Agencies with as few as a dozen officers on upwards to thousands, are taking advantage of what StreetCred has to offer. Selby and Henderson leverage each other’s experiences and even traded careers in order to better understand the problems and create real solutions. The impact is proving StreetCred’s vision of “making a difference” – not only for the men and women walking the beat, but our citizens, too.