The need for information-led policing
Controversy often surrounds Home Secretary Jacqui Smith when speaking of the UK's police force. However, she has stood by a decision to allocate £50 million to the police to spend on devices such as PDAs. SPSS' Robert Martin advocates the use of handheld devices to reduce police time behind desks and help solve crime
The PDAs will allow officers more time in solving crime and helping the local community, and less time at a desk in the station. Nevertheless, the Government's initiatives to increase the level of technology available to the public sector may not be just a case of spending more - but also spending more wisely.
It's important not only be able to quickly assimilate and interpret data, but allow the searching of information obtained both quickly and easily. Many police forces already use techniques such as Predictive Analytics to look at transient patterns in data and then use link analysis to highlight a trend. However, the full potential for this technology when working with information surrounding criminal behaviour is often left untapped. The importance of analysis becomes apparent when you consider that data, which is seemingly irrelevant to one case, can often help to solve another.
Data collection
Witness reports often represent unstructured text and so Text Mining, which can spot patterns in free text to link witness statements together, is essential in solving crimes that can sometimes span back fifty years. Often, reports taken by different officers can contain discrepancies – police officers abbreviate their words in reports and so statements from different officers often don't match. Also, in some communities, English is not always the first language. Therefore, only by data sharing and mining can intelligence be gained. It is important then that data is controlled at the point of collection. If you control the access and type of information collected it is much quicker and easier to analyse.
The analysis
Once data is collected in a meaningful way, the next step is analysis. When analysing any data it is important to confirm what data is already held and what is known about crimes, as well as to discover new relationships in the data. The speed and accuracy of analysis becomes even more important when we consider the average time taken needed to solve major crimes.
Predictive Modelling
After analysing the data, it is possible to filter it and find the key elements that can provide pointers to possible terrorism or crime. The Dutch national police agency (KLPD) use a 'digital washing machine' which uses data cleaning to extract information from computer files and filters out only the information that is important. The information is then converted into text files before being able to conduct text mining to show existing and potential relationships. The system allows the Dutch police to not only check sub-cases and their notes, but also Internet data that can amount to terabytes in size.
Public v. private
The private sector has led the field in information technology and can provide enormous technology transfer advantages to the public sector. Jacqui Smith's announcement of PSA 23 (Public Service Agreement) – a charter designed to make communities safer – will mean more emphasis on the police to not only detect, but also prevent, crime so we can identify individuals before they become fully-fledged criminals. US and European police forces already use Predictive Analytics for these purposes. They forecast hotspots that may arise at the beat level and use the predictive technology to give multiple indicators on what is going to happen. This can be combined with incident statistics from the past to determine the most likely outcome.
The longer the time between the incident and the actual analysis of and reporting on the evidence, the less valuable is any data. It is therefore increasingly essential that data plays a more central role in the fight against crime.
