John S. Morgan, deputy director for Science and Technology at the NIJ, manages the agency's science and technology portfolios and provides strategic science policy advice for the director and the Department of Justice. Morgan directs a wide range of technology programs for criminal justice including the President's DNA Initiative, less lethal technologies, body armor, modeling and simulation, geospatial, information technology and communications.

Before he joined NIJ, Morgan was a scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. He also served eight years in the Maryland House of Delegates. He received his Ph.D. in material science and engineering from Johns Hopkins University in 1990 and his B.S. in physics from Loyola College in Maryland.

Following the symposium, Doug Samuelson interviewed Morgan to get the deputy director's take on the reinvigorated relationship between O.R. and criminal justice. Following are excerpts from the interview.

NIJ has an illustrious history of supporting some of O.R.'s best work, and some of O.R.'s most famous people have worked in criminal justice. Care to talk about that history?

NIJ does have a long history in operations research dating back to its founding in the late 1960s. Even in its early days, NIJ was involved in developing an operations research model to better understand how decision-making within the criminal justice system affects the flow of people through booking, into court and then into corrections. From the very beginning, operations research has been a critical way science can serve criminal justice. I think there are enormous opportunities to build on past work and do some new things.

Is there any past work that stands out in your mind as something you would like to connect to now?

One item is the JUSSIM (JUStice SIMulation) model that was developed in late '60s and early '70s that analyzed the flow of individuals through the criminal justice system. We are currently sponsoring a project to upgrade that model using our improved understanding of feedback mechanisms, the latest computational tools and extensive data sets compiled by criminal justice agencies. [For details, see www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij].

Another model, developed in the 1970s, addressed the jury system and resulted in the one-day/one-trial concept. That concept really came out of operations research. The courts face a number of infrastructure problems that operations research might help solve. For example, we'd love to take a look at ways to deal with increasing caseloads.

Police dispatch is another area we should look at. I saw an article a few weeks ago, in my local paper, about a highway traffic accident. Six or seven different public safety agencies responded to the scene even though the magnitude of the accident was such that only one or two agencies needed to respond. But everybody descended on the scene. It just happened to occur at a spot where a lot of jurisdictions felt like they might have a role.

The dispatch of resources to critical incidents is very much based on a narrow knowledge set the 911 operator has at the time the call arrives. The current effort to standardize terminology is a good first step. But we must go further. We don't want police officers responding to every burglar alarm within five-minutes and then not have officers available to respond quickly to a life-threatening crisis elsewhere. We want to make sure our officers have the greatest chance of being in the right place at the right time. Part of the solution is effective information sharing and good communications, but another part — and a critical part — is being able to take that information and analyze it extremely well with objective historical knowledge.

The core question is, How do we analyze emergency response situations up front and determine what resources really need to be assigned? There will be times when analyses show a need for more resources, and there will be times when there's a need for fewer resources, but the bottom line is, there needs to be a much better over-arching knowledge and analysis of each incident so the response is more appropriate.

Related to police dispatch is the potential use of advanced sensors to signal possible criminal activity. For example, NIJ has sponsored several evaluations of gunshot detection systems in various cities around the country. The operation of the technology has been an issue, but the technology has improved enormously in the last five years. Now we can distinguish between gunshots and similar sounds, like fireworks. So the gunshot detection issues are now more about the location of the sensors and the dispatch decision to send an officer. Operations research can certainly play a major role in these studies.

In some police departments, resources are barely adequate to respond to all the 911 calls, and that means a lot of other things don't get done.

That's absolutely true, and I don't believe criminal justice agencies are going to have their budgets doubled in the next five years. It's just not going to happen. They're going to have to learn to be more effective with the dollars they have. So being able to make rational, objective decisions based on good analysis is increasingly important. Operations research can obviously play a positive role in that regard.

To add to the manpower resources problem, homeland security issues require law enforcement to handle security operations as opposed to law enforcement. All these things play into the idea that we want to maximize resources by deploying officers more effectively. At the same time, law enforcement is having its own internal debate: Do we focus on community-oriented policing or crime-reduction policing?

And do they complement or conflict with each other?

Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton is a very strong advocate of CompStat policing [i.e., "computer statistics" with an emphasis on crime mapping, decentralized bureaucracies and the "broken windows" approach]. He understands as well as anybody the conflict with community policing. Are you going to deploy officers on the basis of detecting and responding to and suppressing crime, or are you going to deploy officers as a community-building, community-relations activity in hopes that that will in the long term improve the crime picture? Both activities have been found to be effective. Chief Bratton has seen 16, 17 years of declines of crime in several different jurisdictions where he's been the chief using CompStat-like techniques, and we certainly know that community-oriented policing has been effective as well. This again is an area where I think operations research has value. Most chiefs don't want to choose between community policing and CompStat policing. So the question for them is, How do I deploy my officers so that I make effective use of both strategies to deal with crime?

It's a very difficult problem. We know, for example, that in most major urban centers, crime is localized — that is, 10 to 20 percent of the city's blocks may have huge decreases in crime, while most of the rest of the city shows no change at all. What that suggests is that crime is an extremely localized phenomenon, that how police are deployed can have a very strong effect on crime, and that deployment strategies are critical to everything, from crime reduction to economic development. I'm hopeful operations research will help to elucidate some of that and provide models that chiefs can use to deploy officers most effectively. This is something that NIJ has already identified as a research area — it will take some years to develop those techniques — and it's certainly a long-term interest for us.

How, then, is NIJ going to invest in O.R.?

I know there are concerns because for about 10 years NIJ did not invest in operations research. There were a lot of reasons for that, the biggest being a general disinvestment in criminal justice during the late 1980s and early 1990s. So it's going to take time to rebuild the program. Fortunately, the current administration increasingly recognizes and supports the idea that the federal government play a knowledge leadership role in state and local law enforcement.

There will never be a time when the federal government directs state and local agency operations, but state and local agencies do, however, look to Washington as a scientific resource, as a resource for research and for best practices. State and local agencies can't afford to maintain such research resources on their own. Operations research is just one element of this, but it is an important one, especially as it relates to our role as knowledge leaders.

I think it's a good time for us to be re-energizing NIJ's work in operations research. As deputy director for science and technology, I am going to take it one step at a time. By building the operations research portfolio slowly over time, I think it will be clear that we are interested in the long-term. Given the budgets we have and the many other high priority issues, it is unrealistic to try to ramp up a huge program and expect it to be sustainable over time.

Do you have any sense yet of what scale of effort the consensus will support in the intermediate term?

I'm expecting that we can support five to 10 significant O.R. projects on a continuing basis. That's what I would like to do, and there's every reason to expect that we can do that within our current resources. As things evolve, maybe that number will evolve as well to a much more significant level. That's where we're heading right now.

Do you see significant opportunities evolving to collaborate with Department of Homeland Security and other agencies that have, in the short-term, functioned as competitors?

In the operations research field, I think our main partner is going to be the Department of Defense because Defense has played a heavy role in operations research to this point. There are many opportunities to leverage DoD work for criminal justice system applications.

I'm optimistic that over time we will also see significant collaboration with DHS. Although our missions are distinct — DHS worries about homeland security first responders and NIJ worries about law enforcement technologies — we do share many problems that require similar technological advances and analysis work based on O.R. principles. Both of us, for example, have a common interest in information-sharing systems. DHS just provided about a million dollars to co-fund some work we're doing with the regional justice information system in San Diego. It is one of the most effective regional information-sharing systems in the country. We're building arches to be able to share information with just about every state in the Southwest and up and down the West Coast. That's another opportunity for operations research because that's all about pushing out information to individual officers as effectively as possible and helping them to make good decisions.

So if there's going to be a push for crossing some lines and doing some cross-problem work, then the push isn't necessarily going to come from NIJ?

Well, we're not going to tell Homeland Security how to do their work. We have our own issues with respect to crossing disciplinary lines. We struggle with those, and we are going to try and solve those problems. We have a lot of friends over in DHS, and we certainly encourage them to do good things. We have two active MOUs [Memoranda of Understanding] with them on collaborative research work and technology transfer work for public safety.

We've also done a lot of work with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. We have a border research center that works with law enforcement agencies along the border. We've done a lot of work over the years, before DHS was even there, on immigration and customs enforcement. We have a nice joint program with FEMA — an MOU on officer safety, particularly with respect to vehicle lighting: How to better light fire vehicles, EMS vehicles and police vehicles. That's a long-term interest we have to improve safety because many officers die each year from rear-end collisions at traffic stops.

Have you persuaded them to use seat belts?

There are now more officers killed in the line of duty by accidents than by felonious assaults. We have a lot of issues with officer fatigue causing problems because of overtime. How to schedule officers to provide adequate coverage without excessive overtime is another operations research problem. We've had a great relationship with FEMA on that issue.

What other activities have you started that relate to NIJ's overall strategy to establish a sustainable O.R. program?

We are establishing a focus group to examine operations research from a justice perspective. The focus group will help us develop the long-term requirements for research projects. The group is made up primarily of practitioners, but we will bring in scientific experts to help the practitioners hone their ideas into projects that make sense to the research community.

We expect to issue a solicitation this spring for operations research proposals, and we're very, very excited about that. I hope we get a wide range of high-quality proposals. It's a great opportunity for the O.R. community.

Where are you drawing people from for the O.R. focus group?

A wide range of law enforcement people. It's really a practitioners-based group. After the focus group makes recommendations, then we'll assemble a working group of scientific experts to hone the ideas into things that make sense to the research community. This process is typical for NIJ. We have about 20 different working groups that help us do research requirement development. They are all practitioner-based groups giving real operational problems to us that they encounter on a day-to-day basis.

Any other areas of NIJ activity that you'd like to mention?

The greatest interest in NIJ from the congressional appropriations side is really in the forensic sciences. More than half of NIJ's appropriation now is in the forensic sciences area. Our biggest line item is the DNA initiative, which is a $110 million program. Of course, most of that money is in capacity building, but a large amount of the money is in research. As a result, we're very, very interested in proposals that address operational issues in the crime laboratory, forensic evidence collection, the impact of different kinds of evidence on adjudication outcomes and similar problems. Those folks who are able to develop good relationships with crime laboratory people and address problems that are relevant to them, are going to have a lot easier time around here because that's where Congress has decided to put a lot of funding at NIJ.

Does that mean some of the more traditional areas like dispatch and flow through the court system are sort of in a steady state?

It means that Congress gives us large appropriations for R&D in the forensics area over and above our regular base funding. Traditional areas like dispatch and courts are part of our regular base funding.

What else do you see as your vision for the future?

Technology has fundamentally changed criminal justice practice during the last 20 or 30 years. We've seen the advent of body armor, of forensic DNA and other technologies, for example, that have changed law enforcement forever. And the future holds the promise of many, many more changes. Things like biometric technologies, more advanced information systems and other forensic technologies are improving much more rapidly than most people in the public really understand.

We feel very strongly that NIJ needs to be at the forefront of those changes so that when an advanced technology gets deployed, it is done so in a responsible and effective manner. It might have been better, for example, if we had updated use of force policies before TASERs were widely introduced. That's not a criticism of TASER; it's a recognition that we want to be more proactive in the discussions around deployment of technology. That's something that's a strategic need for criminal justice and a role that NIJ wants to play.

We very much appreciate the work of the operations research community to assist us in understanding how best to use new technologies. I think it's going to be critical to our activity over the next five or 10 years. I think it can bear a great deal of fruit for criminal justice agencies. I'm very, very hopeful that we will look on the hiatus in our investment as a historical hiccup, and we'll be able to move forward very aggressively from here on out.



Doug Samuelson (samuelsondoug@yahoo.com) is a senior analyst for the Homeland Security Institute in Arlington, Va.; president of WINFORMS, the Washington, D.C., chapter of INFORMS; author of the "ORacle" column; and a frequent contributor to OR/MS Today.

Note: The solicitation Morgan mentioned was, in fact, issued in April, as announced in that month's issue of OR/MS Today. The closing date was May 21. Interested researchers are encouraged to visit NIJ's Web site, www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/funding.htm, for other NIJ funding opportunities or visit www.grants.gov for other federal funding opportunities. You can receive e-mail notifications about federal funding by registering at: www.grants.gov/applicants/email_subscription.jsp.

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