Introduction to the SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence Diagram Section Selector
Do you have an avatar? No, I’m not talking about a beautiful blue creature from the fictional moon of Pandora. I’m talking about the personalized digital character used to represent you online in place of a picture or real-time video of yourself. Maybe you’ve created one on social apps like Snapchat or Instagram? Or helped a coworker create one for their meetings in the Teams app? Or perhaps even like me, many years ago, you looked on as your six-year-old created one for you in the Wii Sports game? Well, whatever the reason as to why you created the avatar there was always one thing you did – consciously or unconsciously – and that was assess the physical attributes of the person that the avatar was intended to look like.
As you scrolled through the many options (or few, if we’re talking Wii Sports circa 2008), you considered each physical feature and started selecting the options based on the person’s appearance. You gave the avatar as many of their exact characteristics that you could, which was then used to identify them quickly and easily in a game or a profile picture.
In this post, you see how SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence’s Diagram Section Selector aids law enforcement agents in logging physical traits of individuals like investigation suspects and how they use those assessments as a reference to later help identify the suspect.
Here is an example of an avatar recently created for me based on my real-life picture. You can see in each picture I have green eyes, blonde hair, fair skin, pierced ears.
Select any image to see a larger version.
Mobile users: To view the images, select the "Full" version at the bottom of the page.
While my avatar’s features may not be exactly proportionate or the correct shade of colors to the pixel, when in a group of other avatars, we can assume that you could most likely make a reasonable deduction that the avatar represents me. If not exactly, at the very minimum you can rule out other avatars with obvious differences to help zero in on the avatar of me that you are looking for.
SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence’s Diagram Section Selector allows for the solution administrator to add reference lists like names and locations of the anatomy, and features like piercings, tattoos, or scars to aid in logging physical traits of an individual. With pre-defined body parts and features officers can point and click to quickly make selections. This allows an officer to select an area of the body from a list and then simply click the limb or appendage on the diagram that the officer wants to document. In this picture, you see the person identified as a male with a back tattoo.
Now augment that diagram with text and images and you get a more complete visualization of the suspect’s appearance and their identifiable physical markings.
While human anatomy is one way to use the Diagram Section Selector in SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence, there are additional use cases where the control can be configured for selections like vehicle damage for incident reports. But to keep with the anatomy premise, in the example below, I’ll use the diagram selector to record physical characteristics and markings like the ones used for my avatar - green eyes, blonde hair, fair skin, and pierced ears. You’ll notice in addition to ear piercings in each ear’s lobe, there is also a single yellow star stud piercing on the upper right ear.
We see that I have made selections on the diagram and added text in the description field to expand upon those selections. Again, using an assessment of physical appearance as was done to create my avatar.
We know that sometimes investigations can take several months to many years, so it is important to gather as much detailed information as possible about the person’s appearance. This allows the officer to refresh their memory as needed, or for other police agents new to the case to get a better understanding of the suspect’s overall appearance.
Once the information is entered into the system it can be updated or deleted, as necessary, depending on user permissions. Over time, additional features can be added, as well. For example, in an investigation that lasts several years the physical appearance of a person can change drastically like new tattoos, marks, scars, piercings, etc.
Gathering as much detail as possible can help ensure officers capture the correct person, or at the very least even rule out the incorrect person. For example, two people going by the exact same name can be distinguished apart by physical attributes notated in the diagram records. Identifiers like tattoos or scars can be logged to reference the location of the tattoo on the body and offer additional information like the specific design, size, and color.
These identifiers can possibly even contribute to a person’s backstory that can reveal personal information like a loved one’s name, or birth or death date, a gang affiliation, religious beliefs, or even just their favorite tv show through creative expression. Let’s say officers are looking for a six-foot-one man named Randy Smith with brown hair and green eyes to question him about an incident at the local gas station. The person they are looking for was also observed to have a 12-inch tattoo of a lion’s head on his back. But later when they come upon a five-foot-nine man with brown hair and green eyes named Randy Smith at the same gas station, they only see a back tattoo of a bear eating beets, not a lion.
The officer can determine, or bring in an expert to establish, whether there is or was a figure of a lion underneath the bear with beets tattoo. If it is decided there is or was no lion tattoo, and the man’s height is not the same, the officer can most likely assume that the Randy Smith they encountered is probably not the person they are looking for.
As you see, SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence’s Diagram Section Selector aids law enforcement agents in quickly and easily logging physical traits of individuals and allows for later use of those assessments to update features or use as a reference to help identify a suspect.
