VALCRI

Page 1

Plotting a path through crime data Vast amounts of data are available to the police in the fight against crime, yet it is not always easy to sift through it and identify key points. We spoke to Professor William Wong, Dr Chris Rooney and Dr Neesha Kodagoda about the VALCRI project’s work in developing an intelligent system to support police analysts and help them work more effectively The

police and law enforcement agencies today have access to large volumes of data in the fight against crime, yet sifting through it and identifying the key points relevant to a specific incident or tactical policing operation can be a challenge. The effective use of intelligence and historical data can help police analysts gain important insights when investigating crime, a topic that lies at the core of the VALCRI project. “We aim to develop a simple and intuitive interface to help police analysts drill down into what sorts of crimes are interesting with respect to a certain investigation. We can then provide additional support on the similarities between these crimes, and which of them show certain attributes,” explains Dr Chris Rooney, the project’s Technology Lead. This builds on the knowledge that criminals can be predictable in the traits they reveal and the way they operate,

72

their modus operandi (MO). “They may like to enter a property in a certain way for example, because they know that it works for them. So it’s about detecting those specific traits and identifying other crimes where those traits have also occurred,” says Dr Rooney.

Reasoning workspace A lot of this kind of data has been amassed over the years, so a key challenge now is ensuring it can be navigated effectively and presented to police analysts in an accesssible, easy-to-digest way. This is not always the case at the moment, as it can be difficult for analysts to locate and identify the information relevant to an investigation. “Data is often spread across different systems and databases, so it can be quite hard for analysts to piece the data together,” outlines Dr Rooney. The project aims to help address this issue by

integrating a number of technologies into a coherent working environment for police analysts, called the Reasoning Workspace, which enables an analyst to see the key information on a single interface. “Currently analysts use lots of different Screen shot of a crime card that is used to collate possibly relevant background data from many different sources into a single source. This includes (i) details about the crime and its victims and known offenders, (ii) other crimes and incident logs that occurred in a similar time and space, (iii) the modus operandi with the analyst’s search terms highlighted, and (iv) relationships to similar crimes based on extracted traits.

EU Research


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.