Ozer joined the police academy in 1996 in Ankara, Turkey, where he studied police science and criminal justice. Upon completion of the academy, he became a police sergeant, and was responsible for preparing reports that evaluated threats of terrorism.
It was there where Ozer designed PAS, which could track more than 40,000 individuals engaged in possible terrorist activities.
When Murat came to the U.S. in 2006 to pursue a PhD. in criminal justice, he partnered with the Cincinnati Police Department to use the same database system that he created in Turkey. The goal: to pursue and detect crime in the Cincinnati area, particularly in the city's Uptown district.
"I applied the same principals to the Cincinnati Police Department, and we added over 10,000 different pieces of evidence to the database and we don't use any social media data to build our cases," said Ozer.
Initially, the technology was used to track gang-related violence. However, Ozer found that prosecutors were not willing to engage in gang prosecutions; they found it too difficult to put the data together to build their cases to present to the judge.
So, Ozer reframed the data to depict high-to-low violent neighborhoods and violent persons, leaving gang relations aside, since this can be hard to determine.