Top 4 Ways Business Intelligence Solutions Help Fight Crime

Any law enforcement officer will tell you the most valuable weapon in fighting crime is information.  Incorporating business intelligence into law enforcement departments can get the police the information they need to effectively combat, and possibly prevent crimes. Let’s look at some of the ways law enforcement departments are using business intelligence solutions.

Big Data – Getting A Head Start

By receiving new information from data, recognizing and identifying suspicious activities and behavior, and enabling law enforcement to get a head start on criminals, police officers can take a preventative approach to the crime using data analytics. State-of-the-art analytics tools help law enforcement agencies identify criminals even before they commit a crime. More and more law enforcement officers are turning to big data crime analysis tools, and it has proven to be a tremendous help in crime prevention and proactive investigations.

Law Enforcement Analytics (LEA)

Progressive law enforcement agencies around the world are using a combination of location intelligence and predictive analytics – together, they are called law enforcement analytics (LEA).

LEA combines many technologies, including the traditional business intelligence concepts – dashboards, ad hoc and predictive analytics, data mining, mapping, and enterprise search. This method is unique because it not only integrates many technologies, it also has the capability to consolidate, displace, and access data from numerous sources in a variety of formats. 

LEAs immediate benefits to reduce crime include predicting future activity based on past activity, sending real-time information on past criminal activity to field officers, and deploying and tracking officers to specific areas. Additionally, law enforcement agencies can model “what if” scenarios based on key variables, and see where to deploy resources by using a map interface. 

Criminals Beware

Big data is also being used for large, dangerous criminals such as sex abusers.  Pedophiles create a network that produces and shares large amounts of data involving children. The advancements of data analytics allow police investigators to search through vast amounts of data including images, videos, texts, and HTML to locate someone who has traded images of children. 

Financial crimes such as insider trading, money laundering, insurance fraud, and healthcare fraud are not able to escape the extreme effectiveness of big data analytics. Organized crime groups are not exempt from big data software either. By merging structured and unstructured data, big data software has the capability to analyze it for potential evidence of a crime. It also delivers the evidence that is needed to sue criminals involved in financial fraud. 

More Information = Less Crime

Today, law enforcement agencies have a substantial amount of information to help them solve crimes. From store security cameras, past police reports, and witness’ mobile phones, this information combined with data analytics tools and the people trained to understand the data make it much easier to catch the criminals – sometimes before the crime ever occurs.