This story of a COPLINK Success Story comes from the outside the state.
The Board of Supervisors approved the Orange County Sheriff's Department joining COPLINK on May 20.
An investigator I know called me on a Monday and asked if my laptop and I would like to have lunch. We met at Anchors downtown while standing in line he briefed me on the case:
On Sunday he was working an extra job at a church and found a Navy Credit Union credit card in the parking lot. He secured the card to turn into property after court on Monday. Monday came and while in court was speaking with a loss prevention officer from a local retail store. The loss prevention officer told him he was there on a bad check case. Upon showing the check to the officer he noticed it was a Navy Credit Union check. The check and the found credit card belonged to the same person. The loss prevention officer had video of the person who wrote the check as well as the vehicle (including tag) he was driving.
While waiting for our food we went to the table, I popped my wireless card into my laptop and fired it up.
Upon running the persons (victims) name in Coplink it was determined her purse was stolen from her vehicle along with her wallet. The tag and vehicle came back to a person who had been arrested in Bradley County. The officer identified the arrestee as the suspect in the current case from the video. Warrants were taken out on the individual. Coplink also linked the vehicle to a residential burglary from 2 years earlier where tag information was obtained from a witness. The vehicle and suspect information matched the current suspect and that information was turned over to the Property Crimes Unit for prosecution.
They called our number and we sat down to enjoy a nice lunch and talked about how in less than 2 minutes we had just solved a case that would probably never have been solved because we did not have access to the information from Bradley County before Coplink. We would have never known the tag (which came back not on file) belonged to this person. The jail photo from Bradley County (30 miles away) made the identification of the suspect instantaneous. This is the most effective tool for law enforcement investigations that I have ever seen.
To read the Department blog account of the Board of Supervisors approving a COPLINK connection click here.