Law enforcement technologySophisticated analytic software helps identify criminals
Law enforcement agencies around the world are increasingly using powerful predictive analytic software to help fight crime; the software is capable of compiling massive quantities of data from criminal records, Internet files, phone calls, monetary transactions, traffic movements, and patrols in seconds; Los Angeles, Memphis, and Bangalore currently use or are experimenting with these predictive analytics; in Memphis fifty-four criminals were apprehended using the software
Software lets police concentrate assets efficiently // Source: gothamist.com
Law enforcement agencies around the world are increasingly turning to sophisticated computer software to help them fight crime.
Several police forces around the world have developed complex predictive analytic software that compiles mass quantities of data from criminal records, internet files, phone calls, monetary transactions, traffic movements, and patrols in seconds.
In Florida, police departments began using a software system, last April, that analyzes past offense history, home life, friends associations, and gang affiliation to predict which previously convicted youths have the highest likelihood to become repeat offenders.
According to Digital Communities, Florida departments found that the software gave officers the ability to see the larger effects of combined influences and multiple factors that is often missed when looking at data individually.
Memphis Police recently arrested fifty-four criminal suspects after using statistical data from its new Crime Reduction Utilizing History (CRUSH) software in conjunction with traditional undercover police work.
CRUSH was developed in partnership with the Memphis Criminology and Research Department in 2005 and the Memphis Police Department is lending it to two police departments in the United Kingdom.
Elsewhere in the world, Bangalore and the Los Angeles Police Departments are experimenting with similar analytic software called Nostradamus.
According to Amarnath Bhat, the managing director of Oriental Software, the Indian software company developing Nostradamus, “Predictive analytics applications can uncover unexpected patterns and trends and can even develop models to guide actions from billions of historical records.”
He says conventional policing methods are effective, but only up to a certain degree.
Police “can fight or prevent a crime effectively only when it either has a clue — say crime history and records — or a limited number of suspects.” But “when police have to sift through a huge amount of data, say mapping crime and predicting likelihood of a crime from the data collected through sifting 100 million phone calls made in a city, in a day, the conventional methods prove to be inefficient,” he explains.
Similar predictive analytic software exists, but Nostradamus and CRUSH are unique in the quantity of data that the software can process.
“In societal level crime where a pattern has to be created from vast amounts of data with no clues, predictive analytics works the best,” Bhat added.
The National Security Service in Armenia also employs similar technology.
American software giant, IBM, is investing heavily in this technology. Its application Cognos 8 BI forms the foundation for CRUSH. In the last four years, IBM has invested $11 billion to build its analytics portfolio.
