IBM Content Analytics: Rapid insight for crime investigation

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1 IBM Content Analytics: Rapid insight for crime investigation Discover insights in structured and unstructured information to speed case and identity resolution Highlights Reduces investigation time from weeks and months to hours or days Analyzes unstructured information to derive new trends and patterns in a shorter time Increases forensic analysis capability by accurately extracting key entities like persons or objects of interest when investigating mass amounts of textual case information Delivers rapid insight by connecting structured data with unstructured information to provide a 360-degree view of suspects and relationships Eases strain on law enforcement budgets by improving operational efficiency Frees up personnel to pursue faster case resolutions with historical and real-time analysis of trends and patterns in unstructured information and related structured content Analyzes web pages and social media sites to identify potential threats before they occur When it comes to successfully solving cases, law enforcement agencies know that time is the enemy. And as societies become ever more complex due to social media, immigration and the ongoing digitization of daily life, so too does the task of law enforcement. From burglary, vandalism and other violent crime to tax evasion or mail fraud, investigative work is still highly data-driven. Difficult-to-trace crimes such as terrorism, money laundering, hate crimes or threats made on the Internet illustrate the need to enhance and accelerate the process of data gathering and analysis. Resolving suspects identities and solving cases requires correlating information from all available investigative reports, forensic reports, personal records and witness statements, which allows law enforcement officials to create a more contextual assessment of evidence and criminal activity. Sifting through these reports manually is time-consuming, and investigations can take weeks if not months. Different reports and data types are often scattered across multiple structured and unstructured sources, further complicating the process of comprehensive intelligence gathering. Integrating this information is crucial to solve cases. Law enforcement agencies need technology that can speed up the process of discovering, analyzing and linking information. Content analytics provide the capability to extract, search and analyze crucial information from disparate sources and improve the speed and quality of intelligence gathering. By using content analytics tools, agencies can not only solve cases more quickly but also identify nonobvious relationships within data that could possibly prevent a crime from happening in the first place.

2 registered sex offender in a neighboring county, but by moving to a new city, he was able to hide that information first from the school during the hiring process and then from investigators after the crime. Access to that information could have prevented the suspect s hiring or quickly led to his capture. Content analytics can unlock valuable information hidden in previously unavailable resources such as unstructured content, textual description of criminals and case files trapped in data silos, allowing these insights to be integrated with other analytic systems or data warehouse solutions. This creates transparency into public records, even if a suspect s data and evidence is scattered across different locations and jurisdictions. The following examples illustrate how content analytics provide value, and how the technology can be used by authorities to detect, track and model suspicious activity. Drawing information from siloed information sources Law enforcement and public safety agencies are frequently faced with multiple independent data silos, each containing important information but not interconnected. This means that police records in one jurisdiction may not be available to another jurisdiction located only a short distance away. The inaccessibility could create exposure to criminal activity if agencies cannot view or access all relevant information, such as not seeing previous arrest warrants during a traffic stop or not being able to perform a truly complete background check. For example, a suspect in a recent UK murder case was working in the school where the crime took place. He was a Content analytics can also search and analyze across multiple information sources, extracting key pieces of information like new addresses, credit cards or passports that can help resolve identities, build relationship networks and trace patterns of behavior. Assessing threats through Internet sites and social media As a source of information, the Internet can be both useful and overwhelming. Access to social media gives law enforcement agencies the opportunity to identify threatening language that may provide advance warning of threats to politicians, public figures or communities at large. However, the tremendous volume and variety of data available makes rapid, comprehensive analysis difficult or impossible with traditional business analytics systems. Content analytics offer the ability to use natural-language processing and other statistical and machine learning techniques to extract facts, entities, concepts and objects from vast repositories of unstructured or textual information, including the Internet. 2

3 Using content analytics can turn these vast unstructured data sources into an asset, allowing authorities to analyze blogs and social media sites to help intercept crimes. You can combine insights extracted from the Internet about people, affiliations and locations with existing structured data analysis to create intricate social network graphs and analysis. Content analytics can also perform text mining in multiple languages, enabling relevant insight in a foreign language to be surfaced graphically and analyzed to capture new trends, patterns and relationships Riots and violent assemblies present a real-world situation in which the technology could provide value. Police could use content analytics to forensically investigate social media feeds to identify and prosecute rioters who engaged in looting. For example, during the 2011 riots in London, authorities linked records to establish the fact that more than 25 percent of the rioters had each committed more than 10 other offenses in the past. 1 stretching back decades by location and types of crime that yield immediate insights to point police in the direction of the most likely suspects. In one instance, investigators used historical information as well as telephone numbers and call records to provide a link to previous crimes and uncover the fact that a suspect s boyfriend had an uncle who was once booked for fencing stolen property. This intelligence allowed police to follow the trail of stolen goods in a fraction of the time it might have otherwise taken, and also alert law enforcement involved in similar or related investigations in other states or counties. Using content analytics to draw faster correlations Another challenge for law enforcement is being able to understand the history and relationships of suspects quickly in an investigation from the minute a crime occurs, the window of opportunity to catch the perpetrator begins to close. Content analytics can help authorities to rapidly assemble relationships that connect suspects to key elements of the crime, such as locations or related organizations across jurisdictions. The technology makes it possible to rapidly search and correlate clues and information from different cases, such as a suspect s age, race, clothing worn and modus operandi. The data can provide timelines of activity 3

4 Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state and local levels are undergoing a transformation to address key needs for policing today and in the future. It is vital that they find new opportunities to reduce cost, improve operational efficiency and anticipate and solve crimes faster. The right crime intelligence solution leveraging powerful content analytics can provide a variety of significant operational advantages regardless of the type of crime the agency is working to prevent. Reducing investigation time from weeks to hours Trusting the intelligence you have and understanding the relationships between information and the connections between all persons of interest can help law enforcement agencies continue to improve operational efficiency and close investigations faster. An open-standards platform and robust content analytics platform give law enforcement agencies the flexibility to tailor solutions to quickly filter out irrelevant results and inaccuracies from unstructured sources ultimately reducing false positives. The highly accurate and detailed facts that are extracted and then analyzed through easy-to-use visualizations can reduce investigation time from weeks and months to a matter of hours or days. Case in point: Analytics in action A UK law enforcement agency used IBM Content Analytics to extract and cross-reference telephone numbers found in documents. In the past, the agency relied on a team of analysts to identify previously seen phone numbers using keyword search technology. This approach was problematic, as the team returned many items that were not phone numbers at all, but false positives such as such as passport numbers and credit card numbers. They also found the same phone numbers with different area and country codes (in other words, not true matches). To avoid these problems, the agency used IBM Content Analytics to perform high-precision text analytics to identify numbers that were definitely phone numbers and eliminate those that were definitely not phone numbers. It was then used to cross-reference all of the phone numbers (a challenging task in performance terms) so that when a new document arrived, the analyst was presented with a list of all phone numbers and for each number, a list of previous references to that phone number. The solution saved each analyst six hours per day. 4

5 Making a difference for law enforcement around the world The IBM Content Analytics platform s cutting-edge capabilities, such as text analytics, natural language processing and search, help formulate solutions to a variety of law enforcement challenges. Here are examples of how it delivered benefits for two specific agencies: A global anti-terror agency uses IBM Content Analytics in a crime intelligence solution to plot social network diagrams to visualize relationships and personally identifiable information that could be linked to criminal activity. A Europe-based law enforcement agency used IBM Content Analytics as part of a major pedophile investigation. The agency applied IBM Content Analytics to a combination of web social network data and seized computer data to plot the relationships between members of the pedophile ring. Providing a 360-degree view of suspects and relationships Analyzing trends and patterns in real time allows law enforcement to make faster decisions and establish previously impossible correlations by gaining a complete, 360-degree view of suspects and relationships. The foundation for being able to derive faster insight comes from integrating disparate types of data from a variety of sources to establish a massive database of cleansed and normalized data. Using federated search capabilities for detailed content acquisition and entity extraction, content analytics crawls multiple repositories and documents in different formats and languages, and finds and extracts the different entities and their relationships. IBM Content Analytics: A rapid insights platform IBM Content Analytics is a robust yet flexible content analytics and search platform that can have a real-world impact on criminal investigation, fraud detection and proactive safety measures through its capability to unlock valuable insight from unstructured content residing inside and outside of an organization. IBM Content Analytics includes feature-rich views and a user-friendly interface designed to enable interactive, real-time exploration. It helps law enforcement workers investigate trends and patterns over time, discover nonobvious relationships and highlight previously unknown correlations. 5

6 IBM Content Analytics also enables deeper insights through customization and integration with other analysis systems. For example, it can deliver insights to a data warehouse, other business analytics solutions like predictive analytics, or advanced case management solutions. The included modeling capabilities and support for advanced classification tools are designed to help government organizations build criminal intelligence solutions that leverage the pre-existing, underlying content models. These models can help improve contextual, semantic understanding of content and reduce the costs and complexity of locating relevant data. Law enforcement workers with little or no prior analysis expertise can gain rapid insights using built-in features of IBM Content Analytics such as: Support for analysis of more than 30 content sources and more than 150 content formats Automatic extraction of meaningful concepts and entities from text Multiple graphical views of the different facets of unstructured content Automatic highlighting of interesting anomalies and correlations in the data Support for crawling and analyzing historical cases to improve advanced case management Searching for the best content analytics solution A recent example provides an interesting view of the growing shift toward deploying technology to accelerate investigations. A large law enforcement agency invited eight vendors to a head-to-head content analytics competition to see which one could deliver the best solution with the most accurate results. For the information to be valuable, each solution s out-of-the-box heuristics needed to reach levels of quality above 90 percent. The vendors were given three weeks to produce results the first week for installing the solution, the second for tuning it and the third for running it. The sample query was to resolve the identity of an individual with a name beginning with the letter P who was born between 1961 and The challenge involved cross-indexing near-matches, entering associated passport numbers in structured databases, and obtaining biographical background from a variety of unstructured sources. The goals were to resolve the identities to a single list, eliminate duplicates and reduce effort for the investigators. IBM won the competition, which led to the deployment of a 12-month project that is now operational and delivering real-world business benefits. Pursuing ongoing innovation in crime intelligence As law enforcement agencies continuously strive to sharpen crime intelligence gathering and response time, it is vital to embrace technological advances that can make a difference. Content analytics brings shape and form to the process of turning massive repositories of seemingly unrelated data into an operational asset that can curtail criminal activity at the source. 6

7 Moreover, rapidly identifying and resolving the identities of suspects both in the real world and online gives law enforcement a competitive edge in establishing links and relationships that would not have been seen before. The technology to do this illustrates that everyone is connected to everyone in some way. Being able to use this knowledge for the good of the general public provides law enforcement with a unique opportunity for continuous innovation. About IBM Enterprise Content Management Content analytics from IBM Enterprise Content Management (ECM) enables law enforcement agencies to make better decisions, faster. By gaining control of unstructured information, agencies can access, analyze and influence business decisions in new ways, making content a first-class source of insight. With industry-specific IBM ECM solutions, agencies can capture, manage and share content throughout its life cycle to help ensure compliance, reduce costs and maximize productivity. The IBM ECM portfolio includes a wide array of capabilities that integrate with existing systems to help organizations maximize the value of information, including document capture and imaging, social content management, advanced case management, information life cycle governance and content analytics. More than 13,000 global companies and government organizations rely on IBM ECM to improve performance and remain competitive through innovation. Join the conversation at ibm.com/community/ecm For more information To learn more about IBM Content Analytics, please contact your IBM marketing representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit ibm.com/software/ecm/content-analytics 7

8 Copyright IBM Corporation 2012 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY Produced in the United States of America March 2012 IBM, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/ copytrade.shtml This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. The client is responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable to it. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with any law or regulation. Statements regarding IBM s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only. 1 Bentham, Martin. Quarter of those charged over riots had already committed 10 offences. September 15, standard/article quarter-of-those-charged-over-riots-hadalready-committed-10-offences.html Please Recycle ZZS03073-USEN-00