Social networksUsing Social Network Analysis to disarticulate criminal networks
Finding the broken link in the criminal networks that bind economies and societies is a gigantic task that often leads the investigative actions of the police and judiciary up a blind alley. the advancements in the field of information technology and data analysis may be used to effectively deal with organized crime, terrorist groups, and street gangs.
Finding the broken link in the criminal networks that bind economies and societies is a gigantic task that often leads the investigative actions of the police and judiciary up a blind alley. The ability to reconstruct the warp and woof of the relationships that keep members of a criminal organization together is one of the most delicate and complicated actions that has to be carried out by law enforcement agencies. Nonetheless, the advancements in the field of information technology and data analysis may be used to effectively deal with organized crime.
Prof. Antonio Liotta, an expert in Big Data analysis and complex networks and professor of Data Science at the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology of the Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (Italy), is the author, together with colleagues from different universities (University of Messina, University of Palermo, University of Derby, Shanghai Ocean University, Edinburgh Napier University), of two studies – “Disrupting resilient criminal networks through data analysis: The case of Sicilian Mafia” (on the PLOS ONE Journal) and “Criminal Networks Analysis in Missing Data scenarios through Graph Distances” – in which modern graph analysis techniques are applied to criminal networks.
The Missing Data Problem
It is not easy to apply the science of Data Analysis to the investigation of criminal organizations because most of the data is missing. For more than obvious reasons, there are no large databases describing their composition and internal structure, and data in investigative and judicial records are difficult to access. “Whoever is part of the criminal world modifies the data on purpose, makes them opaque, unintelligible”, says Liotta, “let’s think, for example, of the “pizzino”, the small slips of paper that the Sicilian Mafia uses for high-level communications, or of the affiliates used by mafia bosses to communicate with other people. When they listen to a tapped telephone, investigators hear the voice of the intermediaries and not of the real boss and so they struggle to identify the real instigator of a crime. There are also other cases in which the boss, for example, talks to a person – say, for instance, the baker – who is not a member of the criminal network”.
