Put Advanced Crime Analytics to Work: Gun Trafficking

Amid the furor surrounding the political and policy debate on gun safety laws, all sides tend to agree on at least one issue: a priority for law enforcement is the ability to identify and stop the sources of illegal gun sales.

Until recently, investigative work on gun-related crime was conducted by most U.S. law enforcement agencies without the benefit of analytics software.  Oftentimes, this approach was painstakingly slow. Investigators often required weeks to build a single lead as they manually waded through a backlog of gun crime data to piece together links between ballistics and straw purchasers of weapons.  

Over the past few years, however, there has been a marked change as an increasing number of law enforcement agencies at the local, state, and federal levels have begun to deploy advanced crime analytics software.  In a recent survey of 450 police chiefs, federal investigators, analysts and other law enforcement officials conducted by Wynyard Group, more than 20 percent indicated they now use advanced crime analytics software to combat gun crime. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed said they felt crime analytics software would improve their effectiveness and efficiency. A recent Inc. Magazine article on using advanced analytics to solve crimes faster noted, “What used to take weeks for highly skilled data scientists to sift through can now be crunched in minutes by non-technical law enforcement using software tools that dramatically simplify the ability to manipulate vast amounts of unstructured data.”

Case in point

At one U.S. state police agency, investigators using crime analytics tools are now producing leads in a matter of hours rather than days or weeks, enabling them to identify suspected illegal straw purchasers faster than ever before. The agency used a key metric in its investigation of illegal gun sales, which it calls the “time to crime.” Using analytics software gave law enforcement even more insight into the “time to crime” rates.

Clearly, this and numerous other examples point to the fact that one of the strengths of today’s analytics technology is its ability to dramatically speed up the discovery of relationships in order to produce a far more complete picture of a weapon’s sales, ownership, and use history than most veteran investigators ever thought possible.  Advanced crime analytics is capable of rapidly searching across vast quantities of data, identifying connections between people, guns, addresses, crime scenes, vehicles, and other entities – far faster and more accurately than manual processes.

This is particularly important when you consider that criminals often move from place to place. As a result, evidence of their crimes becomes scattered across city, state, and national borders.  Today, the crime solving success of a murder investigation in one city may hinge on what a police officer in a town 20 miles away does or does not do with the gun taken into custody as part of a felony car stop.  Adopting standardized crime gun and evidence processing protocols, therefore, has become more important than ever before and can show immediate results.

With that in mind, law enforcement agencies nationwide have begun putting the power of advanced crime analytics to work in the ongoing battle against gun trafficking and gun crime by:

• Linking “straw purchases” with gun crimes -- Illegal gun purchases, often made by individuals who act on behalf of others who want a gun, but are blocked from buying one because they are underage, or have criminal records, mental health issues, or other factors, can be rapidly linked    to gun crime data via data analytics.
• Overcoming human error and searches vast quantities of data -- Advanced crime analytics is capable of searching a large volume of disparate data to identify individuals of interest.  It also makes it easier to highlight human error by comparing and connecting data to surface anomalies that may require further investigation. 
• Cross-referencing firearms information – The software tools deploy search and query functions along with automatic extraction and linking of entities to connect ballistics-related data from bullets and cartridge cases to known offenders, organized crime networks, or terrorists.
• Linking and visualizing firearms and forensic data – Crime analytics tools allow multiple law enforcement agencies to link ballistics data to guns. .  As a result, a bullet or cartridge found at a murder site in one city, for example, could have the same markings as one found at a crime scene in a different city, indicating that the same gun was used in both crimes.
• Sharing data – Because criminals and the evidence of the crimes they commit move from one place to another, crime analytics tools can enable law enforcement agencies a jurisdiction apart or on opposite coasts to share lawfully obtained data. In response to its high rate of gun violence, Chicago police seized 3,470 illegal guns in the first six months of 2015 – 60 percent of which originally were purchased out of state. That data, with the appropriate data sharing agreements in place, could then be shared with the original states of purchase to link crimes and criminals across jurisdictional boundaries.

While the case for using advanced crime analytics to fight gun trafficking and crime is a strong one, there are nonetheless several key factors that law enforcement agencies needs to consider when setting up an analytics capability. James Lingerfelt, a senior consultant with IBM’s Global Smarter Cities Team, notes that to truly succeed, all analysis must be based on an across-the-board understanding of what is necessary to achieve the operational goals that contribute to accomplishing the agency’s mission.

According to Lingerfelt, agencies must also determine whether they need their own analytics group or whether inter-agency collaborative models would be more appropriate. And if an analytics group is established, agencies must decide how it should be staffed, how it should be placed within the agency, and how it should be used. Ideally, agencies would reserve analysts for more sophisticated challenges, while most personnel would be able to use predefined reports and analytical tools to support their roles.

While elected officials debate where, to whom, and how to apply gun control, law enforcement certainly is not standing still. By increasingly making use of powerful new data analytics software, law enforcement agencies are working more effectively and efficiently in the local, state, and federal battle against illegal gun sales, trafficking, and use.