Law-enforcement technologyRochester, Minn. wants to stop crime before it happens

The Rochester Police Department in Rochester, Minnesota is using IBM’s Infosphere Identity Insight to predict, and combat, crime. Tim Heroff, captain of services at RPD, considers the technology a “real game-changer in law enforcement.”

Before adopting the technology, the department was “swimming in information” without an efficient method to analyze and use the information for crime prevention. “About three years ago we introduced a new paradigm called Intelligence-Led Policing, and one of the tenets of ILP is that a very small percentage of offenders are actually responsible for the majority of crime,” Heroff  told Computing. “Identify those individuals and focus your departments resources on these ‘most serious and prolific offenders,’” said Heroff, “and you’re going to have a significant impact on the crime rate in your area.” Heroff insist that connecting enough information about multiple incidents provides the tools for law enforcement to stop crimes before they occur.

IBM’s InfoSphere Identity Insight is used to identify frequent crime offenders, and even when multiple false identifications belonging to one individual are stored on record, the associated relationships of those identities could lead to the correct individual. “It helps us to understand who knows him, who he has relationships with — non-obvious relationships,” explained Heroff. “As you can imagine, when people talk to the police, they don’t always tell the truth. They can switch up their name, their date of birth, and other identifying information.”

Using visual analytics tools such as IBM’s i2 Intelligence Analysis Platform, information is presented in a visual manner. “It allows us to display the relationships like a spider’s web, and it becomes quite apparent why this particular individual was at the scene of a crime; it’s because the vehicle that was there was owned by a person he’s associated with. We have all this information in the management systems already, but it would take a great deal of time and effort to find it all manually. With this tool we can visually see the environment we are dealing with,” Heroff said.

IBM’s Infosphere Identity Insight is expensive and measuring return on investment is a topic for which Heroff has yet to develop a formula. “ROI was actually a significant topic when we went to the city council and said we wanted to purchase a tool that was, frankly, quite expensive,” explained Heroff. The value of the technology is its ability to provide needed information at the right time. “Take making a traffic stop on a car owned by a 57-year-old lady but now being driven by a granddaughter who has poor judgment when it comes to men, and now hangs out with a bad actor”, said Heroff. “Through this process we’re able to determine that, when the officer walks up to that car, there’s a chance he won’t be talking to the grandmother.” “If we don’t have the ability to protect ourselves, how do we protect the citizens we serve? We’re not in the business to make money,” said Heroff.

“It’s difficult to measure return on investment, but we are certainly trying to deliver the right information to the right officer at the right time.”