Crime Analytics is a branch of analytics that deals with the application of statistical techniques and tools for analyzing crime data. Crime analytics deals with the systematic analysis of crime and crime scenes using evidence-based analytics processes and techniques used to analyze the crime quantitatively to mitigate the future occurrence of security breaches and crimes.

Increasing crime rates play a crucial role in impeding the growth of both developing as well as developed nations. This kind of development in criminal behavior has a greater influence on foreign investments as well as the international image of the country in the global environment.

Types of Crime Analytics

There are different types of crime analytics such as Crime Intelligence Analysis, Tactical Crime Analysis, Strategic Crime Analysis, and Administrative Crime Analysis.

Crime Intelligence Analysis is the analysis performed by collecting the data and interpreting it. The assembled facts are used to discover the relationships between the unrelated components of the crime like repeat offenders, crime victims, criminal organizations, and criminal networks.

Tactical Crime Analysis deals with the immediate criminal offenses that require quick responses and resource deployment.

Strategic Crime Analysis involves the long-term study of information and categorization of crimes into demographic and spatial sets that include long-term policies, strategies, and prevention techniques. Administrative crime analysis analyzes the information of law enforcement agencies and the purpose is to meet the administrative requirements of the police agency, and its government and community.

Crime Analytics Pipeline

When it comes to crime analysis, there will be a beginning and end. The entire crime analytics pipeline can be classified into Pre-crime analysis, Runtime crime analytics, and post-crime analysis.

A pre-crime analysis is a predictive analysis used to apprehend people before they get a chance to commit a crime or prevent crimes, which involves predictive analytics, social media analysis, heat list preparation, and aggregated human behavior. For example, it can be used to predict whether a prisoner who has been granted parole will commit a crime or violate the parole restrictions.

In runtime analysis, an area or region-wise risk factors of crime have been analyzed such as liquor stores, bars, clubs, stadiums, etc., where there is a probability of having a high incidence of crimes. Apart from that, social media feeds are used to identify whether any kind of agitation is currently occurring or may occur in the future in any particular area.

In post-crime analysis, the patterns and trends in various types of crimes will be studied to offer support. This helps to analyze the offenders and their modus operandi that will support law enforcement agencies to identify the criminals, links between the suspects, and involvement of suspects in the crime and criminal activities.

Project FLUID Framework and Its Importance in Crime Analytics

FLUID^TM technique offers a human-centric approach than a process-oriented approach of existing frameworks. FLUID^TM empathizes with the stakeholders much better than the existing frameworks. This technique addresses the prototype testing phase better than the other frameworks.

Why FLUID technique is used in crime analytics?

One of the reasons to use this technique in crime analytics is due to the increased incidence of crimes, the growth of the nation will be hindered. When there is a huge spike in crimes, then foreign investments will take a back seat. The high crime rate in a country will also affect the international image of the country. These issues are going to be addressed through the power of analytics and the data will be used to tackle crimes.

What are the different data points to be analyzed to get insights? The different data points that have to be analyzed are emails, chat files, text files, videos, CCTV files, and GPS information. Each crime has its own footprints and these footprints can be anything ranging from email communication to video footage or any such input points to track the criminals.

Case Study 1

San Francisco Crimes

The first case study explains how the FLUID^TM technique helps in strategic and tactical crime analysis. Through this case study, long-term objectives are viewed in a strategic perspective and what action plans are taken to reduce the incidences of crimes in a tactical perspective will be discussed.

This case study explains how do crime analytics helps in analyzing the San Francisco crimes. The main objectives that are addressed in this case study are:

• Identify the major crimes of San Francisco
• Identify the districts with the most number of crimes
• Identify the specific business hours of the day where we observe peak crime rate
• Identify the locations where we observe the highest crime rate

The expected outcomes of this case study are monitoring the occurrence of the crimes in the city, regulation of crimes, and to find the early warning signals of future crimes to prevent crimes.

San Francisco was infamous for its high rate of crimes and notorious who were residing at Alcatraz Island. The data set of crimes in this case study consists of the crime committed, timestamp, category of crime, description of crime including the day of the crime, district in which the crime has been committed, and how the police have resolved the crime and actions taken.

Data sets are fact table that provides interesting insights into the facts. The insights can be classified into strategic analysis and tactical analysis.

Strategic analysis helps the bureaucrats and administrators in making decisions through long-term planning like how many murders can happen for the next 5-10 years, how many police officers are required, what kind of training has to be provided to the police officers, how and where to deploy them, etc., will be answered through strategic analysis.

In tactical analysis, the analysis will be performed to identify the peak hours and location of crimes, and also to identify the time and day in terms of reduction in crime rate. The tactical analysis will be performed to get immediate results.

Fluid technique specializes in creating dashboards that provide detailed insights of data to support crime analysis. Crime analytics will enable you to categorize resolved and unresolved cases based on the categories of crimes, the incidence of crimes, location of crimes, etc.

Case Study 2

Profiling Dark Net Sellers

Case study 2 takes into consideration of the administrative crime analysis. The darknet is known as the internet for criminals. This is an illegal network that supports all kinds of illegal activities. The websites on the dark web are associated with illegal activities such as drug trading, illegal arms trading, procuring controlled substances, buying malware/hacking software, stealing credit cards, enquiring for kidnapping/assassination of people, etc.

David Skipper Everling wrote a python code and had done web scraping on all the dark web websites. However, when the law enforcement agency tried to pull down such sites, these sites reappear under a different name.

The case study only focuses on around 1500 cocaine-related products to perform crime analytics.

Why there is an increase in darknet crimes?

Because anyone with an internet facility can access these dark websites anonymously and get the information of banned substances easily. The second reason is that the increase in the transaction of bitcoin or virtual currencies also causes drug-related crimes. The third reason is the use of an escrow account through which anonymous transactions can be done. The fourth reason is that there are vendor feedback systems, which offer feedback on various products.

In this case study, the dataset of approximately 1400 product listings extracted from Dream Market’s ‘Cocaine’ category is cleaned and standardized. The data was collected with the help of web scraping and text extraction techniques. The data consists of information such as product title, shipping details, the quantity of drug in grams, product quality, bitcoin transaction, vendor details, etc.

Conclusion

The Fluid framework is a tested framework that can be used by any government or non-government agency to operationalize the entire process of crime analysis. The Fluid framework analyzes the data, processes the data, cleans the data, identifies the KPIs, provides insights, and implements the solutions in a real-time scenario. Learn more about the case studies.