Posted by Tyler Wood, Operations Manager at Case Closed Software and Crime Tech Solutions
Investigative link analysis and visualization software is a powerful tool for both law enforcement agencies and the private sector investigators alike. It allows investigators to visualize the hidden, non-obvious connections that would likely otherwise go undetected. After all, we know that the human brain is much more easily able to make connections when information is presented via images rather than text.
The software does, however, need a human to tell it what to look for, and where to look for it. Information is visualized in link analysis software by importing or querying a set of data, and then organizing that data according to parameters set by an investigator. The investigator is responsible for telling the software how to organize the data, and where to gather it from.
A smart investigator will utilize multiple sources when visualizing software. The majority of the time, not all the information needed for an investigation will come from the same source.
Law Enforcement investigators may need to pull RMS data, cell phone records, case management records, and even third party data, etc, to fully understand the big picture in a scenario. By using link analysis to cross-reference these data clusters against each other, the investigator is able to see even more connections, and find even more relevant data that may be crucial in solving a case.
It is important for investigators to exhaust all their resources so they can paint the clearest picture possible. This marriage of intuition and technology ensures that no connections stay hidden from investigation.
The key, as in all of life, is considering the source.
Contact us for more information about how powerful investigation big data link analysis can help your agency today.
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Tag Archives: IBM i2
Using crime analysis solutions to take a ‘Byte’ out of crime
Posted by Crime Tech Solutions
Law enforcement agencies everywhere are tasked with reducing and investigating crime with fewer and fewer resources at their disposal. “To protect and serve” is the highest responsibilities one can sign up for, particularly in light of recent well-publicized criticisms of police by activists in every city.
That responsibility weighs even heavier in a world with no shortage of criminals and terrorists. There’s never enough money in the budget to adequately deal with all of the issues that face an individual agency on a daily basis. Never enough feet on the street, as they say.
New Tools for Age-Old Problems
Perhaps that’s why agencies everywhere are moving to fight crime with an evolving 21st century weapon – law enforcement software including investigative case management, link and social network analysis, and, importantly, crime analytics with geospatial and temporal mapping.
Crime analytics and investigation software have proven themselves to be valuable tools in thwarting criminal activity by helping to better define resource allocation, target investigations more accurately, and enhancing public safety,
According to some reports, law enforcement budgets have been reduced by over 80% since the early 2000s. Still, agencies are asked to do more and more, with less and less.
Analytics in Policing
Analytics in law enforcement play a key role in helping law enforcement agencies better forecast what types of crimes are most likely to occur in a certain area within a certain window of time. While no predictive analytics solution offers the clarity of a crystal ball, they can be effective in affecting crime reduction and public safety.
Predictive analysis, in essence, is taking data from disparate sources, analyzing them and then using the results to anticipate, prevent and respond more effectively to future crime. Those disparate data sources typically include historical crime data from records management systems, calls for service/dispatch information, tip lines, confidential informant information, and specialized criminal intelligence data.
The Five W’s of Predictive Analytics
Within this disparate data lie the 5 W’s of information that can be used by crime analysis software to build predictions. Those key pieces include:
- Arrest records – who committed crimes
- Geospatial data – where crimes have occurred
- Temporal data – when crimes have occurred
- Statistical data – what crimes have occurred
- Investigation data – why (and how) the crimes occurred
Using the 5 W’s, agencies are able to gain insight and make predictions about likely future criminal behavior. For example, if a certain type of crime (what) tends to occur in ‘this’ area (where) at ‘this’ time (when), and by ‘this’ type of individual (who) for ‘this’ reason (why)… it would be wise to deploy resources in that area at that time in order to prevent the incidents from ever occurring. This, of course, is a dramatic over-simplification of the types of analytics that make up predictive policing, but illustrates the general concept well.
Although criminals will always try to be one step ahead of the law, agencies deploying predictive analytics are able to maximize the effectiveness of its staff and other resources, increasing public safety, and keeping bad guys off the street.
More about Crime Tech Solutions
Crime Tech Solutions is an Austin, TX based provider of crime and fraud analytics software for commercial and law enforcement groups. Our offerings include sophisticated Case Closed™ investigative case management and major case management, GangBuster™ gang intelligence software, powerful link analysis software, evidence management, mobile applications for law enforcement, comprehensive crime analytics with mapping and temporal reporting, and 28 CFR Part 23 compliant criminal intelligence database management systems.
Crime Tech Solutions Acquires Case Closed Software
June 1, 2016 (Austin, TX) Crime Tech Solutions, LLC, a leading provider of analytics and investigation software for law enforcement and commercial markets, today announced that it has acquired Cleveland, TN based Case Closed Software in a cash transaction. The terms of the deal were not released, but according to Crime Tech Solutions’ founder and president Douglas Wood, the acquisition brings together two dynamic and fast-growing software companies with an unparalleled complement of technologies.
“For Crime Tech Solutions, the opportunity to add Case Closed Software into the fold was too good to pass up” said Mr. Wood. “We think that the technology offered by Case Closed helps to further differentiate us in the market as the price performance leader for this type of investigative solution.”
Crime Tech Solutions, based in the city of Leander, TX, delivers advanced analytics and investigation software to commercial investigators and law enforcement agencies across the globe. Their solution suite includes criminal intelligence software, sophisticated crime analytics with geospatial mapping, and powerful link analysis and visualization software. The company says that the addition of Case Closed Software expands those offerings even further.
Case Closed Software develops and markets investigative case management software specifically designed for law enforcement agencies. The suite is built around four primary software products including best-in-class investigative case management software, property and evidence tracking, a gang database tool, and an integrated link analysis and data visualization tool. The company also plans to release the solution as Case Closed Cloud for cloud-based access.
“Case Closed couldn’t be happier than to be joining Crime Tech Solutions,” said Keith Weigand, the company’s founder. “The blending of our technologies creates a suite that will add tremendous value to our mutual customers, and will be hard for others to duplicate.”
According to both Mr. Weigand and Mr. Wood, the name Case Closed will continue on as the product brand, given its widespread popularity and loyal customer base. Crime Tech Solutions is expected to retain all Case Closed employees, with Mr. Weigand joining as the company’s chief technical officer.
Crime Tech Solutions says it expects continued growth via ongoing software sales and strategic acquisitions.
About Crime Tech Solutions
(NOTE: Crime Tech Solutions is an Austin, TX based provider of crime and fraud analytics software for commercial and law enforcement groups. Our offerings include sophisticated Case Closed™ investigative case management and major case management, GangBuster™ gang intelligence software, powerful link analysis software, evidence management, mobile applications for law enforcement, comprehensive crime analytics with mapping and predictive policing, and 28 CFR Part 23 compliant criminal intelligence database management systems.)
IBM Crime Analytics: Missing the mark? CTS Hits the bullseye!
Posted by Crime Tech Solutions – Your source for analytics in the fight against crime and fraud.
September 7, 2015. IBM announced this week a major update to its IBM i2 Safer Planet intelligence portfolio that includes a major overhaul of the widely used Analyst’s Notebook product. The product, which has become increasingly abandoned by its user base over the past five years, is now being positioned as ‘slicker‘ than previous versions.
IBM suggests that the new version scales from one to 1,000 users and can ingest petabytes of information to visualize. (A single petabyte roughly translates to 20,000,000 four-drawer filing cabinets completely filled with text).
That’s a lot of data. Seems to me that analysts are already inundated with data… now they need more?
This all begs the question: “Where is IBM headed with this product?”
The evidence seems to point to the fact that IBM wants this suite of products to compete head-to-head with money-raising machine and media darling Palantir Technologies. If I’m IBM, that makes sense. Palantir has been eating Big Blue’s lunch for a few years now, particularly at the lucrative US Federal market level. Worse yet, for IBM i2, is the recent news of a new competitor with even more powerful technology.
If I’m a crime or fraud analyst, however, I have to view this as IBM moving further and further away from my reality.
The reality? Nobody has ever yelled “Help! I’ve been robbed. Call the petabytes of ‘slick’ data!” No, this tiring ‘big data’ discussion is not really part of the day to day work for the vast majority of analysts. Smart people using appropriate data with intuitive and flexible crime technology solutions… that’s the reality for most of us.
So, as IBM moves their market-leading tool higher and higher into the stratosphere, where does the industry turn for more practical desktop solutions with realistic pricing? For more and more customers around the world, the answer is a crime and fraud link analytics tool from Crime Tech Solutions.
No, it won’t ingest 20,000,000 four-drawer filing cabinets of data, and it’s more ‘efficient‘ than ‘slick‘. Still, the product has been around for decades as a strong competitor to Analysts Notebook, and is well-supported by a network of strategic partners around the world. Importantly, it is the only American made and supported alternative. Period. It’s also, seemingly, the last man standing in the market for efficient and cost-effective tools that can be used by real people doing their real jobs.
Part Two: Major Investigation Analytics – Big Data and Smart Data
Posted by Douglas Wood, Editor.
As regular readers of this blog know, I spend a great deal of time writing about the use of technology in the fight against crime – financial and otherwise. In Part One of this series, I overviewed the concept of Major Investigation Analytics and Investigative Case Management.
I also overviewed the major providers of this software technology – Palantir Technologies, Case Closed Software, and Visallo. The latter two recently became strategic partners, in fact.
The major case for major case management (pun intended) was driven home at a recent crime and investigation conference in New York. Full Disclosure: I attended the conference for educational purposes as part of my role at Crime Tech Weekly. Throughout the three day conference, speaker after speaker talked about making sense of data. I think if I’d have heard the term ‘big data’ one more time I’d have gone insane. Nevertheless, that was the topic du jour as you can imagine, and the 3 V’s of big data – volume, variety, and velocity – remain a front and center topic for the vendor community serving the investigation market.
According to one report, 96% of everything we do in life – personal or at work – generates data. That statement probably best sums up how big ‘big data’ is. Unfortunately, there was very little discussion about how big data can help investigate major crimes. There was a lot of talk about analytics, for sure, but there was a noticeable lack of ‘meat on the bone’ when it came to major investigation analytics.
Nobody has ever yelled out “Help, I’ve been attacked. Someone call the big data!”. That’s because big data doesn’t, in and by itself, do anything. Once you can move ‘big data’ into ‘smart data’, however, you have an opportunity to investigate and adjudicate crime. To me, smart data (in the context of investigations) is a subset of an investigator’s ability to:
- Quickly triage a threat (or case) using only those bits of data that are most immediately relevant
- Understand the larger scope of the crime through experience and crime analytics, and
- Manage that case through intelligence-led analytics and investigative case management, data sharing, link exploration, text analytics, and so on.
Connecting the dots, as they say. From an investigation perspective, however, connecting dots can be daunting. In the children’s game, there is a defined starting point and a set of rules. We simply need to follow the instructions and the puzzle is solved. Not so in the world of the investigator. The ‘dots’ are not as easy to find. It can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the needle is actually broken into pieces and spread across ten haystacks.
Big data brings those haystacks together, but only smart data finds the needles… and therein lies the true value of major investigation analytics.
Major Investigation Analytics – No longer M.I.A. (Part One)
Posted by Douglas Wood, Editor. http://www.linkedin.com/in/dougwood
Long before the terrorist strikes of 9/11 created a massive demand for risk and investigation technologies, there was the case of Paul Bernardo.
Paul Kenneth Bernardo was suspected of more than a dozen brutal sexual assaults in Scarborough, Canada, within the jurisdiction of the Ontario Provincial Police. As his attacks grew in frequency they also grew in brutality, to the point of several murders. Then just as police were closing in the attacks suddenly stopped. That is when the Ontario police knew they had a problem. Because their suspect was not in jail, they knew he had either died or fled to a location outside their jurisdiction to commit his crimes.
The events following Bernardo’s disappearance in Toronto and his eventual capture in St. Catharines, would ultimately lead to an intense 1995 investigation into police practices throughout the Province of Ontario, Canada. The investigation, headed by the late Justice Archie Campbell, showed glaring weaknesses in investigation management and information sharing between police districts.
Campbell studied the court and police documents for four months and then produced a scathing report that documented systemic jurisdictional turf wars among the police forces in Toronto and the surrounding regions investigating a string of nearly 20 brutal rapes in the Scarborough area of Toronto and the murders of two teenaged girls in the St. Catharines area. He concluded that the investigation “was a mess from beginning to end.”
Campbell went on to conclude that there was an “astounding and dangerous lack of co-operation between police forces” and a litany of errors, miscalculations and disputes. Among the Justice’s findings was a key recommendation that an investigative case management system was needed to:
- Record, organize, manage, analyze and follow up all investigative data
- Ensure all relevant information sources are applied to the investigation
- Recognize at an early stage any linked or associated incidents
- “Trigger” alerts to users of commonalities between incidents
- Embody an investigative methodology incorporating standardized procedures
Hundreds of vendors aligned to provide this newly mandated technology, and eventually a vendor was tasked with making it real with the Ontario Major Case Management (MCM) program. With that, a major leap in the evolution of investigation analytics had begun. Today, the market leaders include IBM i2, Case Closed Software, Palantir Technologies, and Visallo.
Recently, the Ottawa Citizen newspaper published an indepth article on the Ontario MCM system. I recommend reading it.
Investigation analytics and major case management
The components of major investigation analytics include: Threat Triage, Crime & Fraud Analytics, and Intelligence-Lead Investigative Case Management. Ontario’s MCM is an innovative approach to solving crimes and dealing with complex incidents using these components. All of Ontario’s police services use this major investigation analytics tool to investigate serious crimes – homicides, sexual assaults and abductions. It combines specialized police training and investigation techniques with specialized software systems. The software manages the vast amounts of information involved in investigations of serious crimes.
Major investigation analytics helps solve major cases by:
- Providing an efficient way to keep track of, sort and analyze huge amounts of information about a crime: notes, witness statements, door-to-door leads, names, locations, vehicles and phone numbers are examples of the types of information police collect
- Streamlining investigations
- Making it possible for police to see connections between cases so they can reduce the risk that serial offenders will avoid being caught
- Preventing crime and reducing the number of potential victims by catching offenders sooner.
See Part Two of this series here.
Investigating the Investigations.
Posted by Douglas Wood, Editor.
A few years ago, I read a book called Fraud Analytics by Delena Spann. Ms. Spann is with the U.S. Secret Service, Electronic & Financial Crimes Task Force. The book is an overview of investigation analytics with specific information about some former technology leaders in this area.
The IBM i2 toolset is discussed, along with offerings from Raytheon, Centrifuge, and SAS, and FMS’ Link Analytics, and others. (My friend Chris Westphal, formerly of Raytheon Visual Analytics, by the way, published his book ‘Data Mining for Intelligence, Fraud & Criminal Detection’ a few years ago and is another one I strongly recommend.)
Both books offer advice and use cases on how technology can be applied in the fight against crime. A few months ago, I summarized the types of technology being put to use as tools to prevent, detect, and investigate fraud and other criminal activities. (It’s worth a quick read.) What I’m investigating today, however, is… well, investigations.
“IMA is the most critical connection between technology and investigators.”
In my technology summary, I termed this area Investigation Management & Adjudication (IMA). IMA is the most critical connection between technology and humans within an enterprise fraud management ecosystem. Incorporating key elements of enterprise case management, collaboration, link visualization, information dissemination and knowledge discovery, this layer of functionality is designed to uncover insights which aid in investigating complex incidents. The result ought to be actionable visualization of critical entities, and documented results for potential litigation and regulatory compliance.
IBM i2 has long been considered a thought and market leader in this segment – deservedly or not. Palantir Technologies plays in this area as well. Perhaps no company is more in tune with this market, though, than Visallo with their leading investigation analytics platform. Each platform clearly adds value to investigation case management solutions by providing powerful, emerging functionalities that allow easy and intuitive consumption of data in any form. For investigators, the more data – and the easier that data is to consume – the better.
“Users want actionable intelligence, not endless queries.”
What makes for good IMA? A few things, actually. First among them is the technology’s ability to adapt to the way human beings think and act. Users want actionable intelligence, not endless queries. IMA tools, therefore, ought to interact with the investigator in a consultative way that a fellow investigator would. “Hey, have you thought about this, Mr. Investigator?” and “Maybe you should look at that.”
Second, IMA ought to have context. Technologies that simply point to two entities and say, ‘Hey these things look linked‘ are great but leave all of the thinking up to Mr. Investigator. The IMA tools that I like have contextual values associated to those links. ‘Hey, these things look linked AND here’s why that’s important’. Big difference.
Third, IMA should bring the investigations to closure. There are a lot of data mining tools out there that allow querying with case management. How, though, does the investigator get to the point where an investigation is solved and prosecutable? Once again, the most functional IMA products act the way humans do. They package up the results of the investigation in an easy-to-comprehend document that can be shared internally or with police. No loose ends.
“Every investigation ends with an investigator.”
Predictive analytics, big data, and real-time alert scoring are the current industry buzzwords. They should be. They’re important. At the end of the day, however, every investigation ends with an investigator. Putting the right tools in their hands is often the difference between success and failure in an entire enterprise investigation system.
That’s precisely what Crime Tech Solutions, LLC does. Please take a moment to look us over.
Part Two of this series is now available HERE.