Tower Dump Analysis Success
A detective on a multi-jurisdictional task force used SyncArena to identify a child abductor and rescue the child within 24 hours of incident. The detective from a small county proved to have the right tool for the job even while working with 4 Federal agencies with more substantial resources.
The child abduction took place at a day care center in the suburbs of a small city. Once the child was reported missing, law enforcement checked the surveillance videos at the day care center and found a video of the back of a woman walking out of the building holding the missing child’s hand. Without an identification of the woman in the video, the detectives decided to check other surveillance videos at other day care centers in the area to see if the woman visited other centers before abducting the child. Fortuitously, they discovered that 15 minutes before the abduction, the same woman was found in the surveillance video at another day care center a short distance away.
A last resort technique that law enforcement sometimes uses to identify a suspect that is known to have been at 2 separate locations is a reverse location search, commonly called tower dump analysis. The technique requires requesting data from all the major cell phone providers and other third party at both locations and comparing the records to find any phone numbers or identifiers that were at both the locations during the incident times. This is a notoriously difficult process as each vendor provides data in different formats and they all have different data technologies, representations, and meanings.
With SyncArena, the ‘legwork’ portion is cut out, leaving us with valuable time to interpret the data and locate the suspect" - Detective
Due to the close proximity of the location and times in which the suspect had been observed in the videos, the federal partners were not able to develop a suspect from the data that they collected using their own tools. Afterall, both locations were serviced by the same cell phone towers and the tools they rely on are not able to isolate data effectively from different regions of the same cell tower service areas. The proximity issue was exacerbated by that fact that a state roadway connected the two locations and there was guaranteed to be plenty of drivers that just happened to be in both those areas at that incident times driving along the roadway.
The savvy detective on the task force from a small neighboring county knew that SyncArena provided flexible incident analysis tools with advanced filtering capabilities. The detective simply loaded all of the data into SyncArena and defined the incidents by drawing a circle around each location and specifying the incident times for each. He isolated all the call records, timing advance, and data estimations that serviced each incident specification and ran a quick commonality report to identify 4 phone numbers of people that were using the cell phone towers from both areas during the incident time. The detective quickly extracted the data for each of the 4 phone numbers and immediately determined that the data from one of the phone numbers exhibited a pattern expected of the abductor.
The detective shared this information with the task force and the team was quickly able to identify the owner of the phone, the location the suspect traveled to after the abduction, and where the suspect could be found. Shortly following this break in the case, they found the missing child at the suspect’s home, made an arrest, and returned the child to his parents unharmed.
SyncArena is the most advanced tool to use for all types of reverse location searches. The same incident analysis process can be applied to find the needle in the haystack while working with call detail records, timing advance, RTT, Google geofence, license plate reader (LPR), social media, or advertiser IDs.