“Increasingly, criminal entities are turning to the internet to aid in their efforts—terrorists, drug cartels, and criminal societies have taken advantage of technology to further their nefarious aims. However, this use also provides law enforcement an opportunity…”
At a Glance
A federal law enforcement agency has a challenge: how does it monitor criminal behaviors and communications in order to raise awareness of interdiction opportunities while also exposing non-obvious relationships between criminal actors/agents? Using that information, how could the agency proactively engage and disrupt planned criminal activities?
And how can the agency execute on these needs in a cost effective and efficient manner—exposing information to partner organizations as appropriate? Leveraging Big Data tooling, jStart worked with such an agency to create a solution for its law enforcement needs.
A daunting challenge
Organized crime requires systems to live up to it’s name-sake—to organize their efforts. Increasingly, criminal entities are turning to the internet to aid in their efforts—terrorists, drug cartels, and criminal societies have taken advantage of technology to further their nefarious aims. However, this use of technology also provides law enforcement an opportunity: the ability to analyze data from a multiplicity of data sources, and correlate and vector activities to provide an overview of activities. Apply data and text analytics, and the ability to see activities whose relationships may contain multiple degrees of separation, and you’re left with technology that is providing law enforcement the capability to employ predictive analytics—and thus the ability to make “intelligent predictions” based on criminal activity. This unprecedented ability gives law enforcement the potential to become proactive in their efforts by heading off criminal activity before it occurs.
How Big Data analytics plays a key role
Big Data is not a mysterious or complicated concept: it simply represents the accumulation of massive amounts of data from numerous data sources. IBM, and specifically jStart, have been involved in leveraging massive amounts of data to reveal relationships and correlations that are
“hidden” within this vast amount of information. Doing this allows organizations to take useful action from those insights. The tools available to help sift through the data and then do deep dive analysis currently exist within the IBM portfolio of software. These tools include the following:
See how IBM is working towards
Smarter Public Safety ibm.com/jstart

It's often a mundane detail that ultimately solves a crime. A nickname. A parking ticket. A past address. And it is mundane details— billions of them—which populate the data warehouse of the New York City Real Time
Crime Center (RTCC).
New York is now the safest large city in the
United States, one example of how cities are getting smarter about public safety.
Photo courtesy of The New York Police Department
IBM worked with the New York Police Department (NYPD) to create a data warehouse that could bring together information buried in filing cabinets, on index cards and in handwritten notes. Today, the RTCC stitches together more than 120 million New York City criminal complaints, 31 million national crime records and
33 billion public records...just to name a few.
Sophisticated analytics and search capabilities make connections across multiple databases.
Information can be visualized in seconds on a two-story video wall: a photo of a suspect appears with details—tattoos, past offenses, addresses with maps—quickly filling in. Critical data can be relayed instantly to officers at the scene. What once took days now takes minutes.
IBM BigSheets is a system developed by IBM’s Emerging Technologies group that allows for the easy and quick exploration of very large data sets.
BigSheets lets you get started with big data—understanding what information you have available and allowing you to explore what that data for insights. It can also merge data from numerous sources, giving you a high level overview of what’s possible with the data available to your organization.
The jStart team also has extensive experience with IBM data analytics technologies and solutions as well:
IBM Content Analytics is a technology from IBM’s Information Management group which allows for detailed analysis of information, including text analytics (very useful in understanding the context of the data—even in other languages), as well as relationships between the data. SPSS and Cognos offerings from IBM provides unprecedented abilities to do “deep dive data analytics”. Need to understand patterns amongst individual behaviors? Need to see correlations between factors and parameters within the data? SPSS and Cognos offerings can help you get started.
Wondering how your organization can efficiently store and process big data? The jStart team can also help with Apache Hadoop ™ deployments to solve that very issue.
By leveraging these technologies, the law enforcement agencies can extract information from available intelligence resources and use them to identify individuals, entities, and organizations of most significant interest to law enforcement. The same kind of analysis that companies use to identify and target potential customers can be used by law enforcement to identify and target criminal activities. Further analysis can provide correlations between time, opportunity, and organizations, or reveal relationships between individuals and organizations. In the end, big data can help identify big opportunities for law enforcement—and are technologies the jStart team has a deep level of expertise with. Interested in learning more? Contact jStart, today.
Jim Smith
Manager, Client Engagements
Chief Architect Emerging Technologies jamessmi@us.ibm.com
Tel: 919.387.6653
Learn More: ibm.com/software/jstart/bigsheets ibm.com/software/jstart/bigdata ibm.com/software/jstart/textanalytics http://www.ibm.com/jstart jstart@us.ibm.com
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