Courtesy Photo | Senior Airman Cory Schleyer, of the 179th Airlift Wing and Ohio National Guard...... read more read more
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Senior Airman Cory Schleyer, an emergency management specialist with the 179th Airlift Wing, is making an impact on the fight against drugs in Ohio and nationally.
While not in his Air Force uniform at the 179th AW for drill weekends, annual training or temporary duty assignments, Schleyer spends his workweek working for the Ohio National Guard Counterdrug Task Force (CDTF), which is where he was tasked with developing a system to collect, organize, deconflict and analyze National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) data for the purpose of reducing violent crime and firearm/drug trafficking within the Columbus Field Division (Columbus, Canton, Akron, Cleveland, Dayton, Toledo, Youngstown, Indianapolis, Evansville and Cincinnati) of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
“The mission of the task force appealed to me and I really felt that I would be able to use my skills to reduce both the drug epidemic and violent crimes associated with the drug trade,” Schleyer said.
To accomplish this, Schleyer, with the help of his colleague Tech. Sgt. David Glass, modified a program through recoding, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially developed for epidemiology, and repurposed it to treat violent gun crime as a disease. Instead of tracking Ebola outbreaks in the state of Ohio, the system was recoded to track 9 mm or .40-caliber crimes in each respective city and then compare the collected data to incidents throughout the division.
“The first version of the recoded program took about a month, however, it was very raw and lacked detail and some functions,” Schleyer said. “The program continued to grow over the next 18 months into a legitimate solution where the concepts and theory applied to the program were adopted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to be used in a professionally developed program that I partially oversee the development of.”
The task was two-pronged: first, they would create a uniform data collection method for the entire field division to utilize, and second, use the collected data for case analysis to identify violent criminals and recognize crime trends or patterns that could help predict criminal behaviors.
“Previously, every field office collected data on spreadsheets, not all offices collected the same data, and very few offices collected it in similar formats,” Schleyer said. “The previous methodology also limited offices to only seeing data within their jurisdiction.”
On Nov. 1, 2016, the program was first used to collect data from crime scenes and has been used on a daily basis since. After a successful three-month pilot, the program was pushed out to every city within the field division to track, analyze and predict violent crime behaviors.
Following the program’s initial launch, multiple field divisions of the ATF adopted the program at various points in 2017 as the primary NIBIN Intelligence software, or to be used an intelligence supplement. Since its inception, the program has grown to support nine field divisions and currently houses crime data for more than 112,000 shooting incidents.
“NIBIN has been around since the 1990s, however the collection and exploitation of the data from an intelligence perspective did not really exist on a large scale until the last three to five years,” Schleyer said. “The real gap in NIBIN throughout the years has been the sharing of data within multiple jurisdictions, which is a huge gap, and the recognition of this gap allowed for this program to come to life.”
Schleyer would make numerous visits to ATF headquarters in Washington, D.C., beginning in August 2017, to present the recoded program. It was determined by executive members from the Firearms Operations Division within ATF that the concepts and infrastructure developed and conceptualized by CDTF analysts would be implemented at the national level.
“The ideas and methodology proposed by myself, Tech. Sgt. Glass and the ATF agents bred this program, and a national solution was created,” Schleyer said.
The ATF has formally funded and approved a development contract to have the ideas presented by CDTF analysts, professionally developed as a web-based intelligence platform and made available for all law enforcement personnel at zero cost nationwide.
“Since this program is going to be made available to all law enforcement agencies, it will allow for information gaps to be filled naturally through the program development team, in regards to functionality and design availability,” Schleyer said. “Also, with the sharing of crime data, it will be easier to identify common suspects, victims, etc.”
Data will be ingested into the program in two ways; first, laboratory analysis data will be automatically imported into the program and then local police departments will be able to upload information, either manually or through bulk spreadsheet import.
The datasets will then create a virtual violent crime event file to provide a complete picture of the event, and effectively fill information gaps.
“The Air National Guard has provided me the platform and the freedom to think analytically and act as a problem solver, both within the ANG and as a CDTF analyst, Schleyer said.
It is expected that with this development, the percentage of unsolved gun crimes throughout the nation will markedly decrease. The ATF will be able to use new, incoming data and compare it to historical data to recognize correlations, helping agents develop case files for prosecution and predict future behaviors.
| Date Taken: | 10.29.2018 |
| Date Posted: | 10.29.2018 17:12 |
| Story ID: | 298103 |
| Location: | COLUMBUS, OHIO, US |
| Web Views: | 79 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Using innovation to recode the fight against drugs, by Maj. Paul Stennett, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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