City Prosecutor Doug Haubert speaks during the Empower 2018 Conference Wednesday morning. Photos courtesy of Laserfiche.

The 2009 fatal shooting of a 16-year-old Wilson High honor student shook the Long Beach community to its core.

Melody Ross was killed by a single stray bullet as she sat with friends after attending her high school’s Homecoming football game against Poly High the day before Halloween. The shooter, 16-year-old Tom Vinson was eventually found guilty of her murder and the attempted murders of two gang rivals who were the intended targets.

“That event, as tragic as it was, woke a number of us up and made us think about the gang problem here in Long Beach in new ways,” City Prosecutor Doug Haubert told a large crowd at the Long Beach Convention Center Wednesday morning. 

The gathering was part of a four-day Empower 2018 Conference hosted by the Long Beach-based software company Laserfiche, headquartered in Bixby Knolls. Haubert’s speech provided testament to the usefulness of Laserfiche’s product when it partnered with the city to help officers quickly access case files of potential gang members.

Those files were court orders that were once pieces of paper stored somewhere in city hall or given to a handful of gang detectives and thrown away by gang members who were served by them, knowing the police department did not have an effective way to enforce them, Haubert said. Patrol officers also had to previously make phone calls to police stations, a tedious process.

What’s more, due to budget cuts, about 20 percent of the police force was reduced during that time.

Laserfiche CEO Chris Wacker speaks during the Empower 2018 Conference Wednesday morning.

The court orders come with terms restricting gang members from being in certain areas, wearing certain colors, displaying gang signs or symbols and associating with certain people. If police find them breaking those orders they could get arrested.

Using Laserfiche’s specially designed application in the years following Ross’ death, patrol officers were now able to access such information from their vehicles and quickly identify subjects by their most recent booking photo, date of birth and more.

“What we saw was that in a very short period of time, the number of gang court order arrests dramatically increased and the number of gang-related crimes dramatically decreased,” Haubert told the crowd.

Since then, gang arrests have increased by 650 percent.

The idea to streamline such services came from LBPD detective Chris Zamora and were backed by then-Police Chief Jim McDonnell.

“I want to give the credit for this partnership to the police department from the chief on down to the patrol officers who have used Laserfiche to make Long Beach safer,” Haubert told the Post.
Laserfiche CEO Chris Wacker said the company took advantage of existing technology like geotagging to deliver it straight to police cars.

“It’s not our technology but what we do is take an open architectural approach, a non-proprietary approach to technology in general so we can tie in to the army of developers on the PC platform,” Wacker told the Post. “Few companies do that. They’d like to just manage every aspect of the relationship so therefore they deliver incomplete solutions.”

Wacker said a hallmark of their software is a familiar and intuitive user interface that makes it easier for a police officer to access information.

Now, Haubert hopes to add to that software and expand its capabilities to help officers.
“It’s my hope that in the next year or two we will have the ability to share information across the police department with the availability of social services such as mental health, substance abuse, housing and other critical services and make that available to every police officer so that they have not only the option of arresting a person and processing them through the criminal justice system but also diverting them to an alternative to the criminal justice system,” said Haubert.

The plan is still in the beginning stages but Haubert hopes the city can continue its partnership with Laserfiche to expand on those services.