MR. ASPLEN: By way of introduction, if I could introduce Dr. Colwell, he is a Professor of Criminal Justice and the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute, the National Center for Rural Law Enforcement, which are divisions of the University of Arkansas.

He's a consultant and lecturer, retired in 1985 from the FBI, where he served as Associate Director, the number two position in the Bureau, and let me say this, that the presentation that you're about to see was presented before the working group, the crime scene working group.

However, we thought that the issues that were raised there and the input that Dr. Colwell had were of such value that we wanted to present it to the Commission in its entirety, even though it could have been kind of transferred through the working group, we wanted you to hear from him personally.

So, with that, thank you for being here, Dr. Colwell, twice.

DR. COLWELL: Thank you, Chris.

I must say that it was in less refined form when we presented it at the working group, spontaneous, and I feel like I'm being parachuted in on this lively discussion here, but I have tried to clean it up a little bit and make it more coherent.

I think it important to say several things before we actually get into the substance of the presentation that I prepared, and that is this, that we have been talking about definitions and nomenclature in the last hour or two hours that I've been listening to the discussion, and I think it would be important to note that my part of the presentation today that's captioned training and education, I will talk about a dichotomy between urban and rural policing or law enforcement functions.

I'm not saying that the functions of rural law enforcement are different from the functions of urban in the collection of evidence and the need to follow policy and rules and regulations.

What I am saying is that the functions are implemented in many different ways and levels in a rural area, almost, if you will, in some instances, a different kind of justice system, one that can be characterized sometimes as informal, because everyone knows each other and you have the players often on-site or very close to the situation. I'm talking about judges and coroners and whole host of other things, and I'm speaking today about very small law enforcement agencies.

An agency with 30 or 40 people in a large agency. So, I'm talking about those very, very small law enforcement agencies.

From a demographics standpoint, out of the 17,341 law enforcement agencies, now up over 18,000 with the community policing grants, out of that, if you take out -- exclude everything except municipal and sheriff's offices, municipal police agencies and sheriff's offices, you're down to around 13,000-and-something, and that's the universe that I want to talk about, 13,000-plus law enforcement agencies, including sheriff's offices and municipal law enforcement.

Those two law enforcement entities are responsible for 98 percent of the felony convictions that occur in this country.

Now, a few more statistics.

About one-third of our population live in what is called the rural area, small town or rural counties, and those, if you think of them in terms of political boundaries, they are not likely to change in the coming decade or two decades or three decades or four decades, because in our form of government, a democracy, there's not efficient about representation and who has a police department and who has a county sheriff's office.

For example, in my home state, the county seat -- we have 75 counties in the State of Arkansas. The county seat in each county was determined by how long it took a person to ride on horseback from the furthest reaches of the county to reach the county seat, and that requirement was one day, had to reach the county seat within one day on horseback.

Now, out of the -- we have talked with the FBI, components of the justice department that maintain statistics, we have visited with various entities around the country, and we have spent a lot of time in the United States Department of Agriculture.

We even reviewed congressional reports in, one of them, 1991, where there were 18 states that admitted that they were rural, but if you go around the country, you find rural areas in every state.

So, one-third of the population lives in rural areas. Of the 670-or-so-thousand sworn law enforcement officers, about 260,000 of them perform policing functions in rural areas.

Our definition of rural at the National Center is this: a municipal police agency that serves a population of 25,000 or less and a sheriff's office that serves a population in a county or 50,000 or less.

Now, please understand, I'm generalizing with a lot of these comments, and they don't apply everywhere, but the constituency that we focus on is this 260-so-thousand sworn officers that come from sheriff's offices and come from the very small town rural law enforcement agencies, and often, you will find a chief that goes on patrol all the time as a matter of course and is a working police officer, or a sheriff.

The average size of these departments is about eight people, including the chief.

So, the dynamics in the municipal governments are this: In many states, you have mayors who are elected every two years, and so, in the chief of police position in these small communities, it's like a football coach, they come and go pretty quickly, and then the staffing -- there's a high turnover in staffing.

When you get into the larger cities, you have a more professional environment in the hierarchy in law enforcement, you have a larger tax base, and you have more specialization when it comes to investigation or performing functions of law enforcement.

In the rural areas, you tend to have generalists in all categories.

One other point: I want to touch on some initiatives that we've made on curriculum development for this particular area of law enforcement that I'm speaking about.

We surveyed the 2,300-plus institutions of higher learning in this country and found that there were about 800, a little over 800, 837, I believe, that have courses, academic courses related to law enforcement based on a preliminary review of that.

As we look closer, there's only about 300-and-something who offer some type of an associate or bachelor's degree.

Of that, we came up with about 25 to 30 institutions of higher learning who offer courses in a degree program that is related to the functions of law enforcement.

If you look carefully and as extensively as you'd like, you will find no textbooks on how to be a chief of police or on how to be a sheriff.

We did check with the 50 states and the training academies and other institutions within the states, and we reviewed the task analysis or job performance descriptions that they had performed to identify those functions performed by law enforcement.

We then excluded from that, after review going back past 1990 or older, under the premise that policing is changing a little bit and the organizational structure is changing.

Then we've done about three, maybe four national random survey on the things that concern these people, these officials in these small town rural areas.

They come up with four areas that they believe that they need enhancement of their competencies in, and that is -- one is administrative operations, no surprise there, operations or investigative operations, no surprise there, legal issues, no surprise there, and forensics.

As a result of that, we are in the process of developing a curriculum that we're recommending to institution of higher learning that would incorporate those things that -- those courses that build toward a degree as a liberal arts, so you take the English, the history, and the other traditional courses, but we'll have about -- up to 18 courses that focus on the functions of law enforcement.

Now, out of that, we've also built a -- are building a curriculum on forensics, and at this point, I want to emphasize that our approach to this is not so much an emphasis on training but on education, given the environment and the demographics I mentioned about the characterization of the small departments.

Most of them have as a support a state police or a larger law enforcement agency that they have an informal agreement with where the chief or the sheriff of a not-too-distant law enforcement organization will help the small departments out if they have a crime of violence or a major crime.

Now, one more thing and that is on our national statistics.

If you take the Uniform Crime Report put out by the Department of Justice and the statistics that are managed by the FBI and submitted by voluntary agencies around the country, you will come up with the fact that, in the last six years, there has been a decline in the violent crime rate, but if you're reading that document late at night in order to try to go to sleep and if you haven't gone to sleep with all that statistical data and if you look at the rural areas that I've been talking about, you will find that violent crime in rural areas, the ones I've defined, has increased 53 percent in the last 10 years.

In my home state of Arkansas, it's gone up 84 percent.

I'll proceed with the presentation now, before we run out of time, if I can make this work.

This is just a reiteration of what I've been hearing since I've been working with the working group.

The technologies today, all kinds of samples -- the question is whether or not they've suffered in some way, and the purpose is to confirm or refute statements of suspects, link crimes together, reconstruct events within certain limitations, the potential to look for suspects and link them to the crime scene that will tell us who, if we get the right suspect, but not why, not how, or not when.

These are a reiteration of statistics that are in one of the folders that I gave you, and I won't -- if I can borrow this just a second -- each one of you should have a document that looks like this. Inside, the first page behind that, is about me, very interesting reading, but the second document in there is statistical data that I summarized for you a moment ago, so I won't spend anymore time on this, but this is just a pie-chart breaking those demographics down.

I mentioned that there's been an increase in violent crime in rural areas, there's been an increase in rape specifically, 3.1-percent rise in violent crime in 1997, 10 percent in robberies, 4.6 percent in auto theft.

This is percentages in rate increases. These are all statistics out of the Uniform Crime Report, but they just graphically show -- I'll be glad to stop at any time. I'm going to just run through these to get down to the curriculum.

In 1994 -- since 1994, according to these same statistics -- these are not our statistics, these are U.S. Department of Justice data, the Uniform Crime Report -- rural crime in California has increased faster or at a greater rate in the property crime area than in the urban areas, 22 percent increase in rural areas in the southern part of the United States.

We have focused on education and training. We emphasize the word "education" in our presentations. We are a state-funded entity at the Criminal Justice Institute. It's a university-based system.

We're a campus, stand-alone campus in the state, the only one of its kind in the country, where we combine research, management education and training, technical assistance. We provide free manuals on policies primarily to the rural agencies, because they don't have them.

As the attorneys in the room will note, if you don't have policy manuals, you're not in very good shape if you have a suit that comes up.

Training is not used. There's a defense in the State of Arkansas, because our training doesn't measure up in the risk groups, and the prosecutors don't want to use it as a basis, as a defense. So, we're working in that area.

I say education several times because I view that as attitude-forming, hoping to prepare people how to view or look at a situation.

In Arkansas -- and I'm not banging Arkansas, there's been enough of that in the last year or so, but we have a thing called circle the wagons. We have a crime that occurs, the first responders occur if a -- maybe the emergency teams, medical, if there's a chance the person is still alive, and then the police are there and they circle the wagons.

They all walk around the crime scene, look at it, yes, that's a body, and then they start putting up the perimeters to isolate it.

So, when I say attitude-forming, we're trying in our educational courses to talk to them about the way they perform when they respond to a crime scene.

They don't have any equipment. What they know about technology -- and here I'm talking about these very small agencies throughout the United States. I'm generalizing. There are many, many exceptions. But as a general rule, most of them, their knowledge of technology is something they've seen on tv, usually as a result of a highly visible case.

The integrity of the evidence, we know is a big issue, made a big issue by at least one person in the room, but it goes to the heart of effective professional police work. If you can't trust the integrity of the evidence, it is a poor excuse for going to trial.

DNA evidence has been challenged. It has the potential for contamination, and in that area is where we focus a lot of our attitude-forming presentations.

It's easy to contaminate the crime scene, it's easy to contaminate the presentation, preservation of it, and it's becoming more and more difficult to recognize what is evidence.

I told you about the history for the National Center for Rural Law Enforcement. We operate a simple thing -- it's an internet communications system for these small departments. We pay the lines fees if it's a long-distance call for them to get to the internet.

We have 300 agencies on-line, representing 45 states, 1,100 accounts, and we're about to increase that to over 1,000 agencies in the next month.

How do we get all this information? We've conducted several forums around the country in the last five years, where we bring together anywhere from 175 to 200 sheriffs, chiefs, judges, prosecutors.

We've had mayors present. We've had people from social welfare departments, human services, attend some of our conferences.

Of the needs expressed by these groups each time we have met, they talk about the four things I mentioned. They also talk about the need to enhance their competencies in forensics. Crime scene comes up all the time.

None of them have -- or many of them, a training budget that's $300 for the whole department, so they can't go anywhere.

They have limited resources. If someone attends a school for one day and you've got a five-person department, it's 20 percent of the staff that's gone for that day, not even talking about shifts, if they have that.

Nationally, we've determined based on these surveys, random samplings, that three days is the most they can afford to be away from the department. That includes travel time.

I talked to you about the development of the curriculum.

In our case, everything is funded by the state. All programs that we present in the forensics area, the legal area, management, both operations and administration, is free of charge.

Many of the courses are accompanied by college credit, and we have textbooks for the courses. We're in the process of building monographs for textbooks where they don't exist.

We give tests. We administer a competency exam at the conclusion of the course, and if they complete that, then they get -- they may get college credit for it.

Nothing new about that. We just put, we believe, a little bit more discipline in the process.

Last year, we put on 24 programs involving 435 officers, which handled 125 agencies in our state. We have 494 municipal governments in the state, 75 counties.

From a percentage standpoint, if you look at the people that attended, out of the 10,000 law enforcement officers we have in the state, we reach .04 1/2 percent.

I mentioned the program is no longer than three days, our strong emphasis on integrity, hands-on experience.

Our forensic anthropologist -- we got her from the medical school, and when we do a crime scene involving homicide or violence, we take either replicas or we take real bones from animals, bury them, and we rent these power stations, gas power stations, if it's raining or whatever it is, and we usually rent a space on someone's property, bury them, and let them go find it.

We don't try to teach them how to do it so much. We show them what happens, and we call them -- we ask them to call someone else who is competent to conduct the search and preserve the evidence if they don't feel competent to do that.

Bio-hazard information, personal protective gear -- we've purchased about 360 cameras, with a year's supply of film, for the departments in the state. Then we had to train them how to operate the cameras. That's just a band-aid approach, nothing long-term about that. It hasn't been institutionalized.

Talk to them about contaminating the evidence. They have nothing, as a general rule, in the way of containers to preserve evidence or personal protective equipment, gloves, and so forth.

Now, to put this on balance, most of the major -- I won't say major crimes -- rural counties have major crimes, but the volume of crimes is in urban areas.

So, we're talking about a group of law enforcement officers who don't have that experience level that you get where you're exposed to crimes of violence on a regular basis.

So, that's why we emphasize education and knowing not necessarily what to do but what not to do in order to lose evidence and damage the crime scene.

The database is available or going to be available, new types of evidence.

I've got the word "clearinghouse" here. We use it as a resource center. I apologize for that. We're not a clearinghouse for information, but we do post on the internet, and se send out information on facts and stories that have occurred.

Talked about increasing types of violent crime.

In the rural areas, you have stronger social bonds.

That concludes the presentation. You've got copies of all the slides in the hand-outs, and you've got wonderful information here about rural law enforcement agencies.

I'd be pleased to try to answer any questions or respond to any comments you might have.

I do appreciate the opportunity to come and talk about what I do in my life, what I do in my second life.

MR. THOMA: I'm constantly amazed. I'm a public defender in a rural environment. I just got appointed a couple of years ago.

You're talking about the diversity of what law enforcement has to do on a daily basis. For example, you may only have one murder case in --

DR. COLWELL: -- five years.

MR. THOMA: -- or longer, and then usually they're working on other cases.

Do you emphasize anything in particular, like the most serious cases, or just something else about that diversity?

DR. COLWELL: If I understand your question, we tailor our responses to a particular sheriff or chief, and we will go as deep into it as he or she wants us to go.

Your statement invites a lot of comments, and I'll try to keep them brief.

My background, I think Chris mentioned, is with the FBI.

The thing that I have been most impressed with is that there's a change going on not just in the major cities of more professional and better-educated people but in the rural communities, even though the salaries are -- some of the starting salaries are $15,000 a year, but there's this desire, they want to do things better, and they know that they can be -- I had one sheriff tell me here several months ago, he says we're tired of being just good old boys, we want to be something better than that.

So, there's a desire, strong desire to serve, even though they are not -- this is not in any way a criticism. Their competencies are not at the level that you find in the urban departments.

So, what I would suggest to you, if you consider education and training in this particular part of the law enforcement community, that in my view or our view at the Institute and the National Center, the emphasis should be more on how to approach the crime scene rather than how to do it, because if they preserve the crime scene properly, they can get to people who do it regularly and are more likely to collect all the evidence.

MR. ASPLEN: Given the limitations from a financial standpoint that rural jurisdictions have, funding for training, and the extent to which it's my guess that your program in Arkansas is infinitely more substantial than what most states have in terms of their attention to rural law enforcement, is internet training a viable way to reach rural law enforcement, and if there was the creation of a forensic or a DNA curriculum, that would be a good way to administer it?

DR. COLWELL: Thank you for bringing that up. I've got it in my notes here, but I changed glasses.

We're in the process now of developing an internet program in the management area, because we've reached the point of diminishing returns, where, if you call it, the talking head is very expensive, our mandate in the state is that we provide education and training programs within one hour's drive of every law enforcement agency in the state.

So, we have 11 satellites within the state, but even with all of that, we're only reaching about 18 percent of the law enforcement community, and we do not believe that the legislature is going to increase our budget by another 400 or 500 percent.

So, we are coming close to the delivery of an internet program, CD-ROM, in alliance with a community college or a four-year university, where they come in and, under a structured environment, they have to respond to the computer program, which would be on our server, and they go through a series of things.

So, it will be a learning process at the pace of the student.

It will not be like some of the other law enforcement programs where you can go in and turn on the tv and then go someplace else for an hour-and-a-half and then the video is finished and then you come back and the training officer certifies that you've been through that training.

We are also developing one -- we think that the forensics program is particularly susceptible or conducive to an internet-type program.

We have three distinguished professors emeritus that were working on it with us. Dr. May, who is a forensic anthropologist is developing the program. I've given you, I think, a brief outline of one of those.

We think that's the way to go for this particular constituency, because there's too many of them and you're not going to be able to touch all of them, there's not enough money and not enough experts to go make the presentations.

So, we see a CD-ROM-type program that is monitored by someone, whether it's a community college, and they pass some type of proficiency-level thing of general knowledge about crime scenes.

Of course, when you move into the urban areas, you can get more detailed and more case-specific about what people need to know.

None of my comments have been meant to criticize the rural law enforcement. It's to state a fact and to explore ways to enhance that. There are four states that try to pay attention to us, in my view, California, Texas, Florida, and Arkansas, and of course, we're the leader. We've got to lead in something, might as well be that.

Thank you very much.

DR. CROW: Well, thank you very much. That was very enlightening.

[Applause.]

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