Experts say more coordination needed between agencies.

Thursday, November 5, 2009
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The recent discovery of 11 bodies at the home of Anthony Sowell in Cleveland has left many people questioning why police weren't able to detect the crimes sooner, or even avert them before they occurred. But criminal justice experts says it's not so simple. ideastream®'s Ida Lieszkovszky has more.

Whenever a horrific crime is committed, and it turns out there were clues there all along, the same question comes up: why didn’t someone catch it? That’s what neighbors of convicted rapist and suspected serial killer Anthony Sowell are asking, as police continue to take apart his home in search of evidence and possibly more bodies.

Dr. Steve Egger, assistant criminology professor at the University of Houston Clearlake, and a former police officer, has at least a partial explanation. 

Egger: Well unfortunately police do not communicate very well between police agencies. This is one of the reasons that in my opinion serial killers are allowed to kill and kill again and continue to kill and rack up a number of victims.

A movement towards better communication and intelligence driven policing led 8 of the biggest police forces in Northern Ohio to create the Northern Ohio Violent Crime Consortium, or NOVCC. Cleveland is one of those cities.

US Attorney Steven Dettelbach is NOVCC chair. He says the aim is to create a system that integrates police reports and field investigation data from multiple agencies, so officers have a complete record to work with. 

Dettelbach: We do have a lot of data coming into the system. The idea behind NOVCC is that we have to do a better job of crunching that data and turning raw data into intelligence.

In short, it will tell police chiefs how to best allocate their sparse resources, and figure out where crime is occurring. 

Ida Lieszkovszky, 90.3