Analytics can play a part in finding the needle in the data haystack, writes Joanne Taylor, Director Public Security, SAS.
Spending cuts mean budgets are tighter and resources scarcer. Yet, law enforcement agencies are expected to deliver an equal if not higher level of service than before. So how do they address the challenge?
In combating the impact of the cuts, the data that agencies are required to hold; from crime statistics and number plate recognition data to HR and training records – is potentially their greatest asset. If properly exploited, this data gold mine could provide invaluable insight for law enforcement agencies, allowing them to drive efficiencies by doing more with less. At the moment, this is not easy to do because data is typically scattered across a vast array of standalone systems making it difficult to use effectively.
The good news is most agencies understand this has to change. They realise they need to find a way of using the data they hold to streamline their own operations and get a comprehensive picture of criminal activity. A data platform that enables information to be viewed and analysed holistically, whether physically located in a crime, HR or number plate recognition system, has to be the foundation here. Once this is in place, high performance analytics can be applied to extract insight and provide value.
Advanced analytical techniques have been used in finance and retail environments for years to achieve efficiencies and increase profits. The same techniques can, and should, be applied to law enforcement to achieve similar results. For example, agencies could be analysing all available data to understand crime patterns; keep officers focused on the top crime prevention priorities and target resources most efficiently.
Equally, rather than holding daily briefings, agencies could use analytics to push briefing information in real-time to officers on the beat depending on their physical location – so they are only receiving information that’s actually relevant to them.
However traditional analytical techniques are often not sufficient in the new online world. Gone are the days when most data was held in nicely structured formats, within relational databases. Today, a lot of it is unstructured text in the form of word documents, transcripts, witness statements or internet chatter. This kind of data is potentially really valuable to law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, in the past, they’ve had to invest vast amounts of time and resource in manually going through it to make sense of its content and extract the most valuable nuggets of information.
This is changing fast thanks to the latest advancements in text analytics. Sophisticated linguistic rules and statistical methods can evaluate text like a human mind – minus the inconsistency and ambiguity. The latest text analytics technology automatically generates keywords and topics, categorises content, manages semantic terms, unearths sentiment and puts everything in context.
By applying text analytics, agencies can start to extract intelligence from unstructured data and thereby turn it into a more structured format which can then be analysed together with their structured data. This is really ‘changing the game’ for hard-pressed law enforcement agencies as it means they can now exploit all the data they hold, not just the structured content, and as police officers will testify, it is often the text, such as witness descriptions, that contains the most valuable intelligence.
Analytics key
For the agencies though, the real value add of analytics is that they don’t have to know what they are looking for before they start. They don’t need to have to wade through the haystack looking for the needle. With the latest advanced analytics technology, officers don’t have to rely on the need to ask specific questions.
The analytical techniques will model the data; identify areas of interest for further evaluation; highlight anomalies or suspicious patterns and push information of interest back to the end user, effectively pushing the needle from the haystack. This can then be processed through standard analysis and investigation processes to determine if it is viable Intelligence, effectively converting Big Data into actionable intelligence.
To make all of this happen, agencies must start deploying the right technologies to extract as much value as they can from that data. Without the right tools, pinpointing relevant data in big data that might be of use would be resource intensive and unaffordable.. With the right solutions, law enforcement can sift out information that is irrelevant to them and highlight areas of interest, whether that be to achieve efficiencies or drive preventative policing strategies or investigations.
It is going to be increasingly critical that law enforcement agencies start seeing ‘big data’ as an opportunity rather than a problem and start using that data to drive the efficiencies they so desperately need.
