Dutch police improve public safety with cloud-based social media monitoring tool

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1 Real Impact for Better Government Dutch police improve public safety with cloud-based social media monitoring tool Having a good way to access and monitor social media is as important for modern policing as a gun or pepper spray. That s what we get with PublicSonar. Jan Douwe Grevink, Online Team Leader for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Dutch National Police Corps Dutch National Police Corps 63,000 employees government.nl/topics/police politie.nl In order to enhance public safety and security through effective use of online data, the Dutch National Police Corps adopted the PublicSonar social media monitoring tool. Developed by Dutch company PublicSonar, the product runs on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. With the tool, the police force detects risk and provides on-scene officers with additional information about incidents, and it can even help prevent violent or dangerous situations by monitoring what people are saying on sites like Facebook and Twitter. Netherlands Public safety Company profile The Dutch National Police Corps has more than 63,000 employees who provide law enforcement and public safety services at the neighborhood, municipal, and regional levels. Partner profile Public Sonar publicsonar.com

2 INCIDENT: Saturday, 10:52 AM Almere, Netherlands In the Real Time Intelligence Center (RTIC) for the Central Netherlands, part of the Dutch National Police Corps, Arjan van Straten, Operational Intelligence Expert, surveys six large-screen displays that are arrayed across his desk. As he scans the video and text moving on the monitors, his eyes focus on a flashing alert that has appeared on the right-most display. Van Straten calls to one of his colleagues. PublicSonar has a hit on that domestic violence call in Almere, near the corner of Metropolestraat and Wijsgeerbaan. People have been tweeting about shouting and other loud noises, and there are pictures of someone running from the scene. Get that info to the responding officers. I immediately thought, Ah! We could use this to scan and monitor social media and get more information about incidents to our colleagues on the street. Ronald Otten, Operational Intelligence Expert, Dutch National Police Corps Once the data has been passed along, Van Straten takes a moment to explain what just happened. Here at the RTIC, our focus is on identifying incidents as they happen and ensuring the safety of our colleagues. We gather as much intelligence as possible about ongoing or potential crime and safety issues throughout the Central Netherlands region, and we share the information with police officers on the scene, and other safety organizations, so that they can respond as effectively as possible to the situation. To monitor social media, the RTIC uses the PublicSonar tool, which looks through a huge volume of posts on sites such as Twitter and Facebook and filters them in real time against a library of 500,000 keywords that might indicate incidents that are happening or may soon happen. Van Straten continues, There are times, like the situation we just saw, where people start tweeting about an incident before police make it to the scene, so it s imperative for us to know what people are putting online. A new organization and new technology In the past, Dutch law enforcement included 25 different regional units that had a high degree of operational and structural autonomy. In 2013, those 25 entities merged with the National Police Services Agency, forming a single, national-level organization, along with 10 regional units, known collectively as the Dutch National Police Corps. Although local police still have authority for local decisions, the new regional structure has helped standardize and centralize high-level decision-making and resourcing, including IT planning. Each of the 10 regional units also has its own RTIC for intelligence gathering, and it is important that the tools used by each RTIC account for the distinctive intelligence needs of that region. Here in the northern Netherlands, we don t have the same Internet monitoring needs as our colleagues in the southern part of the country, says Jan Douwe Grevink, Online Team Leader for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), for the Dutch National Police Corps. Because they are on the border with Belgium and France, they deal with a lot more drug trafficking and concerns about terrorism. We find that PublicSonar works well for every region, because it ships with an extensive core library of keywords for law enforcement. And it s also easy for us to develop a local library with terms that are specific to our needs, without having to know any computer programming. PublicSonar grew from a partnership between research organization TNO and Delft University of Technology. Founded in 2012, the company currently has 12 employees at its office in The Hague Security Delta campus. In 2013, it worked on a number of large events including Queen s Day, a huge national celebration. The company helped provide security sensing for an important global political gathering where its employees worked with Microsoft employees, who were coordinating event logistics. This chance meeting led to the birth of a fruitful new technology partnership.

3 Because many high-tech companies were involved, that event generated a strong innovation ecosystem, says Martin Slijkhuis, Industry Lead Public Safety and National Security Western Europe at Microsoft Netherlands. We had a chance to talk with the team members working on PublicSonar, and we discussed the issues involved in mobility and the cloud and how Microsoft technology might be a good fit for that solution. They were using another company s elastic cloud product, but after talking with us, they felt that Microsoft Azure offered better opportunities to scale their product for the future. Adds Hans Burghard, Founding Director at PublicSonar, We saw Microsoft as not only a provider of technology and solutions, but also as the center of a broad network of developers around the world. Through our relationship with Microsoft, we ve had the opportunity to meet numerous other technology companies whose solutions can mesh with ours in ways that enable us to perfectly meet our customers needs. And because Microsoft Azure comes with a high degree of security built in, our customers particularly those in the fields of public safety and law enforcement can have faith that their data is in good hands. INCIDENT: Sunday, 2:52 PM Groningen, Netherlands Grevink works in the RTIC for the Northern Netherlands, which is headquartered in Groningen and Leeuwarden. He is responsible for all OSINT activities within the Northern Netherlands, and he has seen firsthand the ways that effective social media monitoring can be used to manage large public events and gatherings. In 2012, a popular movie about a giant party that gets out of control prompted teens and young adults around the world to hold gatherings inspired by the movie. Because invitations spread like wildfire on social media, some of those gatherings became too large and got destructive or violent. In Haren, right next to Groningen, a 16-year-old girl posted an invitation on Facebook, and we ended up with 50,000 young people in the streets,

4 drinking and in some cases causing problems, recalls Grevink. That was the first time we came in contact with PublicSonar, and it was an excellent resource for tracking what was happening with the party, because so much organization and commentary was taking place on social media. Having a good way to access and monitor social media is as important for modern policing as a gun or pepper spray. That s what we get with PublicSonar. On this Sunday, Grevink and his OSINT colleagues have been helping police officers manage another event, thankfully one without the same violent potential. A large day festival is underway in Groningen, and the PublicSonar monitor started to flag an increasing number of posts about problems with public transit. People have been complaining on their Facebook and Twitter accounts about the trains being too full, and they re starting to get agitated, says Grevink. So we got in touch with the railroad company and asked for more trains to be put into service. The company agreed to do that, and now we re seeing the number of hits in PublicSonar decreasing, which indicates that people are getting into and out of the city faster now. So it s not just police officers who benefit from this tool we re able to use it to improve safety and services across municipal departments. All in all, we consider Microsoft Azure a platform that will help us scale our solutions around the world and offer new functionality to make our tools even more useful. Hans Burghard, Founding Director, PublicSonar A beneficial public private partnership Prior to its meeting with Microsoft, PublicSonar was working on several projects in Belgium, and it had begun talks with the Dutch police force. Due to the massive national reorganization happening within the force, it was essential that any new IT tools could be implemented with minimal demand on police resources. The PublicSonar social media monitor fit the bill perfectly. Because it runs in the Microsoft Azure cloud, there was no need for an extensive hardware infrastructure to support the tool, and PublicSonar assured the force that users of the tool could get up to speed quickly. I first saw PublicSonar at a demonstration that Jan Douwe Grevink gave in Utrecht, says Ronald Otten, Operational Intelligence Expert for the Dutch National Police Corps. I immediately thought, Ah! We could use this to scan and monitor social media and get more information about incidents to our colleagues on the street. Adds Van Straten, We have a wide variety of people working for the police force: some are young, some are old, some are computer savvy, and some are not. It s hard for us to find technology tools that everyone understands. So it was extremely important to us that the PublicSonar monitor is so approachable. Its ease of use is one of the main reasons we wanted it. The Dutch police force began an 18-month pilot deployment of the PublicSonar monitor with three of its RTICs. During that time, the RTIC employees integrated the tool into their workflows and processes, and PublicSonar gained valuable usage information. The pilot helped us learn a lot about our own product, says Burghard Especially the way employees might use it during daily activities. That enabled us to further customize its functionality. By the end of the pilot, the monitor met our customer s needs even better and the force rolled it out to all regions of the country.

5 INCIDENT: Monday, 1:23 PM Maastricht, Netherlands At the RTIC for the Southern Netherlands, Otten and his team have gotten word of a big fire raging near a very old castle in the region. Even while the fire department, ambulance, and police are already on their way to the scene, a request comes in to the RTIC for any information from social media about the fire to give emergency personnel a better idea of what s going on. One of Otten s colleagues scans the PublicSonar monitor, and in just a few minutes he has gathered 190 messages. These include photos that indicate the direction in which the wind is blowing the smoke. He assembles a situation report including all the social media information and the pictures and passes it on to the officer in charge of the response. We think PublicSonar is a great tool, says Otten. It s very valuable in situations like that fire, where we can assist a multiagency response to an emergency. We can also use it to help address incidents before the police are even notified. In one case, PublicSonar caught several messages from people who thought they heard gunshots. There hadn t been any reports to 112 the European equivalent of 911 in the United States but the RTIC team alerted a police car in the neighborhood. The officers investigated and found some young men setting off illegal fireworks, continues Otten. So the situation was dealt with before anyone had called the police. Future plans With its social media monitor successfully rolled out to the entire police force, PublicSonar is looking at ways the company can provide even more valuable intelligence to the force and to its other customers as well. We re exploring more high-end intelligence, and our customers are asking for additional functionality and the ability to integrate with other information sources, explains Burghard. We can use built-in capabilities in Azure to make those connections and give our customers what they want. Product Solution Taxonomies Microsoft Azure Burghard also plans to take advantage of Azure to improve the social media filtering. We re currently evaluating Azure Machine Learning to see how it can empower us to find more intelligent ways of filtering social media sources. And the business intelligence features in Azure complement our technology in the high-end intelligence area. All in all, we consider Microsoft Azure a platform that will help us scale our solutions around the world and offer new functionality to make our tools even more useful. Microsoft Government Customer Success Stories For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit: This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Document published May 2016