GREENSBORO, N.C. — Police departments are always looking for new tools to fight crime, whether it be better patrol vehicles, drones or even body cameras to keep the public safe.
But there is a new platform Greensboro Police Lieutenant Ryan Todd said outshines them all.
It's a search engine called ForceMetrics.
"This is a far quieter but more powerful tool," Lt. Todd said. "In the past two decades of doing this job, it is by far one of the greatest evolutions that a police department will have ever taken technologically to better service their residents."
A year ago, GDP became one of only a handful of police departments to partner with the data analyst company.
Lt. Todd said joining forces helped one of their detectives go from spending 17 hours searching through data for information on someone involved in a homicide to finding answers in seconds.
"When we showed the detective ForceMetrics they found the answer in 7 seconds," Lt. Todd said. "You can only imagine how much good that would've done had this been something we incorporated years ago."
It not only aids in solving crime but it's also used to search keywords that can help in missing child cases.
"When you have a child needing to be reunited with a parent how much time do you have to make that?" Lt. Todd said. "Seconds are too long. That was a case where, within a minute we were able to get the proper information and locate the mother."
Lt. Todd said they can also better handle calls for service, like finding resources during mental health incidents.
"We can build a platform where those services need to be centered on. We can say these are the most common 20 people in the city we're interacting in this way with," Lt. Todd said. "How can we better serve those folks? We can do far greater good on a global scale. "
Advanced technology helps officers make more informed decisions and bring about positive outcomes.
Every year, GPD gets more than 280,000 calls for service.
With each call, there's at least one record or incident report that is now at the department's fingertips in seconds.