Detective work: Professor, students help Endicott police develop better case-management system

When major crimes are committed, solving them can be complicated and exhausting for police investigators, especially when the clock is ticking. Murders, kidnappings, and missing-persons cases all require detectives to move quickly before the trail goes cold. Even lesser crimes require organization and precision when gathering information and identifying suspects.

Larger law enforcement organizations like the FBI and state police use their own proprietary software to track evidence and tips from the public, but smaller police departments can’t always afford it. Compatibility with current information technology and the unique requirements of networking with government systems can also complicate things.

That’s where industrial and systems engineers can offer their expertise to find a solution that works within the limitations.

Defining the problem

In 2023, the Endicott Police Department — just over the Susquehanna River from the Binghamton University campus — reached out to Watson College for help. Chief Patrick Garey used software he calls a “lead-desk” during his 27-year career with the New York State Police, and he understood how it could streamline the investigative process.

When he heard about the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence (SPIR) program, which generally works with small and midsize businesses to solve real-world problems, he submitted a proposal — even though he had doubts.

“I thought it had almost zero chance to be what I envisioned it to be,” he admits. “Police work has so many different silos of information. Every new piece of software or every new process that you bring in, you’re trying to integrate it into these other silos, because it’s so difficult to bring everything under one umbrella.”

SPIR assigned the project to Professor Sangwon Yoon and graduate student Shreya Agarwal, MS ’26, from the School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering. During their initial meetings, Garey tried to take them through how his detectives conducted a criminal investigation using a patchwork of legal pads, index cards, Post-it notes, and Microsoft Excel spreadsheets.

Even Garey wasn’t sure if he was explaining everything well — as with any job, some tasks seem like second nature. For their second or third meeting, though, Agarwal and Yoon brought a process diagram that organized everything they’d discussed and more.

“I looked at this flowchart and said, ‘Holy cow, they captured all of this — exactly what we’re looking for!’” he says. “Then every meeting after that was 10 times better than the meeting before, because they gained that inside understanding of the things that were difficult for us to explain.”

Agarwal began to appreciate how managing information across multiple cases and leads requires considerable time and effort as investigations grow in complexity.

“Automation can streamline information management and reduce the amount of manual documentation that investigators are required to do, enabling them to focus on the process and resolve cases more efficiently,” she says.

Building the solution

What followed was the hard work of designing the new software, dubbed the Police Investigation Management System — or PIMS for short. The Watson team created a piece of it, then Garey offered suggestions for the next iteration. It took four semesters to chip away at the wish list until they included as many features as possible.

“Very early in the process, we knew we were on to something really good,” Garey says. “As guilty as I felt about it, every time I thought of one more little tweak that would make it that much better, I would hit Shreya up, and it would be done in a matter of days.”

With PIMS, a detective supervisor can assign leads to investigators and officers who are already in the field as easily as sending an email or smartphone notification. No one needs to return to a command post to receive the next task. This feature saves valuable time during those critical first 48 to 72 hours of an investigation.

Also, when a case moves into the prosecution phase, investigators can export their findings into a PDF file for prosecutors and defense attorneys. If everything is diligently tracked throughout the process, the well-organized document can reduce the kinds of errors that jeopardize a case.

SSIE PhD student Mohammed-Khalil Ghali, MS ’24, who joined the PIMS project as a collaborator, loved the process as he, Agarwal, and Yoon worked with the chief and his detectives to understand what police needed and why.

“When the overall structure was in place, we took each modular aspect of the software and tried to optimize it further,” he says. “How can we make the notification system better? How can we make the visuals better? How can we make the final report more readable? We started from a very basic version and built on top of it, little by little.”

Testing and launch

Throughout development, Agarwal and Ghali rigorously tested PIMS with Garey, his detectives, and students from the Watson Institute for Systems Excellence (WISE) to resolve software bugs and other issues. In November, they invited University Police as well as departments from across Broome County to a demonstration showing what the system offers.

Having people with varying levels of tech skills try out PIMS and provide feedback yielded better results, Agarwal says: “The detectives are the ultimate users, so it’s important that they go through the workflow. They know all the cases outside the norm that we might not even think about. Having a range of different abilities definitely helped to make this project better.”

Before Agarwal earned her master’s degree this spring, she led the final installation of PIMS on the Endicott Police Department’s government cloud system. Yoon hopes to explore opportunities to market the software to other law-enforcement agencies, too.

“This project is a great example of how industrial and systems engineers can contribute to the public good,” he says. “It also shows the skills

and collaborative spirit we instill in our students at Watson College. I’m very proud of Shreya, Khalil, and the students from SSIE and WISE who supported numerous PIMS system tests and mock drills.”

Garey believes that PIMS — which he has discussed with colleagues in the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police — could save hundreds of hours when pursuing major cases. And now that Yoon and Agarwal are familiar with how criminal investigations are conducted, he likes to joke that he’s going to hire them as detectives.

“The team is fantastic,” he says. “They’ve become like family to me — I really look forward to seeing them every time I do, and I enjoy hanging out with them as much as anything.”

About SPIR

Since 1994, New York state has helped fund the Strategic Partnership for Industrial Resurgence (SPIR) at four State University of New York (SUNY) engineering programs — Binghamton, Buffalo, Albany, and Stony Brook — to seek solutions to thorny technological problems.

Watson College’s SPIR program assists small and midsize businesses through projects that bring together students, faculty, and industry personnel. In addition to problem-solving services, SPIR assists entrepreneurs in developing their concepts into demonstrations or prototypes for attracting venture capital or licensing agreements.

SPIR has helped to create or retain about 2,500 jobs in the Binghamton region, generating $90 million a year. Hundreds of students have also benefited from applying their skills to real-world problems.

While the Watson team developed the Police Investigation Management System (PIMS) project with the Endicott Police Department rather than an industrial partner, the benefits were obvious when Garey submitted the proposal.

“For decades, SPIR has helped hundreds of industries in our region with their unique technical challenges,” says Michael Testani, MS ’02, Watson College’s senior director of outreach and engagement who oversees the SPIR program. “We have done a similar job with the PIMS project, saving the police force hundreds of hours each year by digitizing their case-management processes.

“It was exciting to see this vision come to fruition, and a thrill to support the Endicott Police Department. Ultimately, law enforcement will be able to build stronger cases in far less time, which will make our community a much safer place to live.”