So finally this short actionable information got the killers. Check my earlier note posted a few days back. There were, in all, 90,000 tips left by the callers and it seems finally, finding some patterns and interpreting these patterns, was useful tracking the killers.

Don't you think that 90,000 was a huge number of clues, typically indicating fears and apprehensions of the locals and also indicating surplus of information the police would have to wade through.

The most important thing is - which will only come out of a detailed hearing - that how police used the past and the present information to establish this pattern!

90,000 tips boiled down to 3 key clues

What is actionable information anyways?

Let us define how a piece of information can be deemed as actionable? Is it possible that most of the important information is either in short snippets of text or in small conversation pieces?

Actionable information is information that can be acted upon, something that leads to action, something that makes things happen, starts a chain of action and reaction and most of the time that information is a small piece of "smoking gun" that is hidden in a huge volumes of data. Look for instance at this link. This article refers to the "serial sniper" incident in the Washington DC area.

A tough case to crack

And oddly enough, the information that the police are analyzing is coming from tips left by the callers at a "tip-phone-line" set up by the Montgomery County Police Head Quarters. So there was that one tip that mattered, that one small conversation piece that turned out to be THE actionable point in the whole investigation.