The Future of CrimeOwl AI

The last few months have been a real inflection point for CrimeOwl.

I’ve had serious conversations with law enforcement and with our growing community of investigators about where this platform should go.

I wanted honest feedback. What works. What creates friction? What actually moves cases forward.

We’ve also received a lot of media attention lately, including NBC News Now, Colorado Sun, Denver Post, Florida Trend Magazine, and FOX News.

I’m grateful for it.

Not because of headlines, but because every interview brings more awareness to my mother’s disappearance and to the thousands of cold cases that continue to sit untouched.

From the beginning, I built CrimeOwl outside the red tape and bureaucracy of the criminal justice system on purpose.

I wanted to move quickly. Build like a startup. Iterate in real time. Improve the product as we learn. Drive impact without asking permission.

Potentially solve my mother’s case. Potentially help solve many others.

In a short amount of time, I believe we’ve already made an impact.

Now the question is simple. What path do we go down?

For a long time, I assumed law enforcement adoption was inevitable. That eventually we would fully integrate into that system.

Now I am not so sure.

Why?

Because the system moves slowly. Structurally slowly. Procurement cycles. Liability concerns. Compliance layers. Fear of missteps. All of it compounds.

My original theory was that we could tap into the True Crime zeitgeist to raise awareness for forgotten cases and help clear the backlog, while law enforcement plays a minor role in that equation.

True Crime is massive. Millions of people consume it. Many of them are intelligent, analytical, and persistent. On the other side, parts of the criminal justice system dismiss that entire world as sensationalism.

There are smart people on both sides. But completely blocking that energy from helping solve cases does not make sense to me.

And most law enforcement and professional investigators want nothing to do with anyone in True Crime.

Today, CrimeOwl provides investigator-grade tools for law enforcement, private investigators, journalists, cold case organizations, and victim advocates.

That creates friction.

Even though CrimeOwl is built on Microsoft Azure. Every case is isolated; files do not intermingle. Each case is its own enclosed ecosystem by design.

Insights aren't pulled from the broader internet or social media to prevent the files from being contaminated by bias.

Law enforcement understandably wants full alignment with their workflows. That includes CJIS certification. Clean audit trails. Strict separation from public use.

We have decided not to go the full CJIS route at this time.

That does not mean security is not critical.

It is.

We will continue strengthening security and improving workflow. Think of it as a CJIS light approach. Implement what makes sense. Raise the bar. But do not rebuild the entire company around institutional procurement.

Eventually, we may split CrimeOwl into two different platforms:

• One for law enforcement

• One for the private sector

CrimeOwl currently sits between two worlds.

The startup world that moves fast, rebuilds broken systems, and optimizes for outcomes.

And the institutional world that moves carefully and optimizes for compliance and risk management.

Both have logic behind them. But CrimeOwl was built to accelerate investigations, not inherit the same constraints that created the backlog.

This was not an easy decision. The clearest path to scaling revenue is working directly with law enforcement.

But revenue is not the primary driver.

There has been no meaningful progress in my mother’s case for 18 years. Adding another investigator to the same system does not fundamentally change the system.

In a recent meeting with law enforcement, I heard the same sentence more than once. “I don’t see how AI can solve this case. We’ve done everything.”

You could say that about any breakthrough technology before it reshapes an industry.

No one thought DNA profiling would reopen decades-old cold cases and exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

No one imagined a national DNA database like CODIS could connect crimes across state lines that investigators never knew were related.

Automated fingerprint systems replaced manual comparison because no human could realistically sift through millions of prints fast enough.

The Amber Alert system turned public attention into a structured investigative tool instead of dismissing it as noise.

Before NCIC, officers relied on local records and phone calls. A centralized national database changed how information moved in real time.

Every one of those technologies faced skepticism, legal challenges, and institutional resistance before becoming standard practice.

There are countless other examples in the tech world as well.

Airbnb was dismissed.

Why would anyone stay in a stranger’s house?

Uber was dismissed.

Why get into a stranger’s car?

Not many people thought a simple web page on the internet could drive millions in revenue to a business.

Every meaningful shift sounds unrealistic before it works.

AI is a new technique. That is what technology is. A new technique for solving an old problem.

AI can process unstructured case files at scale. Timelines. Witness statements. Digital records. Open source data. Patterns that would take humans months or years to manually connect.

If we continue to apply the same systems and mindset to the same problems, we should expect the same results.

Another concern raised in my meeting with Wheat Ridge PD was legal exposure. They were hesitant to hand over my mother’s files to me, as the son and founder of the platform.

I understand the caution.

But it has been 18 years.

At some point, you have to evaluate risk versus reward. The alternative is another 18 years.

Or never.

For me, the upside is clear.

Solving my mother’s case brings closure. But it also proves something larger. That AI can meaningfully accelerate investigations.

That serious investigative tools should not be limited to institutions alone. That we can think differently without being reckless.

The system still needs improvement. Unsolved murders continue to increase by 6,000 a year. Only 50% of police stations have the resources to solve missing-person cases, and only 7% have cold-case units.

This is borderline insanity to continue feeding into a system with those numbers.

We will continue strengthening security. Improving workflow. Raising the standard.

We will also explore open-sourcing elements of CrimeOwl to put law-enforcement-grade investigative tools in the hands of capable people who want to help solve crime responsibly.

The mission has not changed.

Solve crimes faster.

Break stagnation.

Think differently.