Why Information Sharing is Key in the Battle Against Organised Crime
Mark Gibson, Sales and Marketing Director, Public Security, SAS talks about inter-agency collaboration and the efficient management of law enforcement agencies.
Law enforcement agencies and police forces across the UK face a range of complex challenges - from increasingly complex legislation to budget cuts and the need to get more from ever-diminishing resources. How best to respond if you are an ICT Police leader?
The context is clear - cuts currently being driven through by the government are expected to result in a claimed 20% fall in funding for the police by 2015 (though the coalition puts this more like 6% by 2014); Labour claims 10,000 Police posts will go by the end of next year and that public safety will be put at risk as a result. Despite facing these cutbacks, the police have to manage ever-changing priorities and respond quickly to unforeseen events.
Adding further to the demands they face, the nature of crime is changing too. Forces increasingly need to pool resources with other crime fighting agencies across the UK and even further afield to tackle the challenges of serious and organised crime and the ever-present threat from international terrorism.
Organised crime, in particular, is on the rise. The 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review claimed “organised criminal activity poses a significant and persistent threat to the UK public and economy” and predicted “it is likely that the threat from organised crime will increase over the next five years, in particular as new technologies make it easier for criminals to hide or disguise their communications and exploit new opportunities”. Meanwhile, the National Security Risk Assessment found a “significant increase in the level of organised crime affecting the UK” - classifying it as a ‘Tier 2’ risk (= are important and require action, and are the next highest priorities? after such Tier 1 risks as a terrorist attack or major natural disaster).
Rising to the Data Sharing Challenge
In response, it is clear the crime fighting agencies and police forces across the UK urgently need to address these threats. Increasingly, however, in doing so, they face two key challenges: to convert data and information into actionable intelligence and to ensure that data is available to those who require it without compromising the security of that intelligence.
This, in turn, means that an ICT infrastructure needs to be in place that enables data to be collated, converted into intelligence, analysed and then shared out among the key project stakeholders in a timely manner.
Currently, the need to handle data integration and facilitate data sharing between different forces and crime-fighting agencies creates significant challenges. Police and agency analysts do not necessarily have the time to search and analyse all the information held in separate Forces’s ICT systems. Key data points may therefore be overlooked, resulting in inefficient investigations and potentially dangerous consequences.
To rectify this issue, project stakeholders need to be working from a single integrated technology platform, which provides excellent visibility into all the critical project information; eliminates double-entry and provides a streamlined process workflow, helping save time and drive faster responses to perceived threats.
Data Sharing in Action
Once it has been fully implemented, the recently announced new Police National Database (PND), for example, should go a long way towards achieving this, helping forces share information effectively not only with other regions but also across a single force, enabling them to see the full intelligence picture and spot patterns of offending that have previously been missed - the Soham murders of 2002 being an excellent example.
The important proviso here is that we are still some way off this point at the moment. Much work still needs to be done before PND actually goes live.
These issues are now being addressed. The interim solution, the Impact Nominal Index (INI), is already up and running. It enables forces to search for suspects and identifies which forces hold information on particular individuals? but it does not provide the information itself. PND takes this on a stage further by holding copies of an extensive range of criminal data in consistent databases accessible to police forces across the UK to search.
Actionable Intelligence
The immense data challenge faced by crime-fighting agencies in putting in place this kind of capability includes the need to deal with massive data volumes, changing and growing data feeds and evolving regulations surrounding the use of data. The nature and level of threats are also constantly evolving as the threat landscape develops and methods and motives change.
To ensure any solution that is deployed today can meet the needs of tomorrow, it is essential that the solution is flexible and scalable allowing it to continuously provide timely intelligence both now and into the future.
Ease of use is a key requirement here. Disparate data, different structures, formats and update rates must be brought together in a way that makes sense to operatives. Information needs to be served to analysts and investigators through a comprehensive searching capability, allowing efficient dissemination to tactical and strategic decision-makers.
After all, in the long-term, the success of any police force or crime fighting agency will hinge on its ability to obtain “actionable intelligence” quickly and efficiently - as well as having the operational solutions in place to help drive that intelligence to the decision makers.
Finding a Solution
Critically too, any system that is implemented needs to be flexible enough to be tailored to fit a force or agency’s business processes, not the other way around. One of the biggest risks and greatest hidden costs involved in the purchasing of any IT solution is having to change existing business processes to fit around a new system.
It is vital that the chosen system can be tailored on an ongoing basis to meet the changing and future needs of a particular organisation. This ensures that the organisation can reduce risk by evolving and adapting to address new or emerging legislation, responsibilities or threats and in turn improve overall return on investment.
To achieve these objectives, agencies, forces and crime-fighting teams urgently require systems that present their analyst teams with the relevant information “all in one place”. This is where solutions providers that can help in delivering tools that provide intelligent visualisation capabilities, allowing investigators to analyse the data more effectively and to forecast and predict likely future patterns of behavior, may play a vital role helping your Force dealing with the challenges of both today - and tomorrow.
This artilce originally appeared in Public Technology - August 2011
