Some Stories Have Happy Endings

A 1970s known offender card from the Cambridge (MA) Police Department

     

When I began my career as a crime analyst at the Cambridge Police Department in the early 1990s, it was just before the global transition to widespread desktop computing. The department, and the Crime Analysis Unit, was still awash in paper reports and records, some quite innovative. The above "known offender" card is an example. There were thousands of these cards lined up in a long drawer, each with information about a known robber, burglar, sexual assailant, or other repeat offender.

   

The edge of the card has a series of variables about each offender--race, sex, age range, type of crime, preferred victim, and so forth. (Races are given as White, Black, Oriental, and "P.R." Apparently, there was no "Latino" or "Hispanic" in the 1970s, just Puerto Rican.) Each attribute had a corresponding hole next to it, and you would punch out the distance between the hole and the edge of the card for the attribute corresponding with your offender. Then, if you had a series of burglaries involving a "Puerto Rican" male in his 20s and you wanted to find all offenders who matched that description, you would stick a long metal skewer through the "burglar" hole and lift up the stack of cards. All the burglars would fall out. Then, you'd repeat the exercise for males and Puerto Ricans and the age range until the only cards you had left were those that matched your filter. It was a physical version of the WHERE command in SQL.

    

We didn't actually use this system by the time I was working there. Most of the cards date from the 1970s. But I thought the system was so clever that I took a scan of one of the cards so that I could use it as an example of a pre-computer database. I've been using the image above in presentations for over 20 years. This particular known offender card was created in 1974 and concerns a man named Joseph, nicknamed "Jo Jo," then in his 20s. Jo Jo was a heroin addict who liked to break into apartments in the nighttime from fire escapes. He also had at least one attempted murder charge.

   

This afternoon, I spoke with Jo Jo.

   

It somehow took me 20 years of using his card before it occurred to me to Google his name and see what became of him. Google told me part of the story and supplied his phone number, and he told me the rest of it. After he hit rock bottom in Cambridge in the 1970s, he turned his life around, moved out of the Boston area, got into rehab, got a graduate degree, and became a substance abuse counselor. He worked in the field for decades before retiring in the 2010s. He is now in his 70s, and he was extremely amused hearing someone call him "Jo Jo" for the first time in nearly 50 years. 

  

We made plans for him  to speak to my CJ 101 class about crime and drugs. 

  

As a crime analyst and quasi-criminologist, I know that Jo Jo's story isn't unique. Lots of criminals age out of crime. I was as likely to find a positive story as I was a 1980s obituary. But sometimes it doesn't feel that way. It was a nice way to start the week.