Streamline Investigations with Crime Analytics Tools

As criminals make use of new technologies to further their illicit activities, law enforcement organizations should empower their investigators with the best, most advanced crime analytics tools.

Enabled by a growing array of widely accessible, easy-to-use hardware and software options, criminals are finding ever-more-complex ways to cover their tracks. For an investigator, that means that tracking an illicit transaction could involve texts on a burner phone; encrypted messages via apps like WhatsApp, Signal, or Viber; emails on numerous platforms; Bitcoin transactions; and so on. It’s not unusual for a single criminal action to involve as many as 10 applications across four platforms. Routine law enforcement now requires the ability to understand and decode a continuously growing list of constantly evolving technologies.

The situation is even more daunting at the agency level. A single subpoena of chat transactions may bring back terabytes of structured and unstructured data. Manually compiling relevant information from such a surfeit of data can take months. For law enforcement agents, wringing investigative value from billions of dissimilarly sourced data points presents a variety of new, technical challenges.

To rise to these challenges, law enforcement needs to make use of powerful processing and analytics technologies. New tools that harness these technologies can reduce the time agents have to spend manually processing, cleaning up, and sifting through data. As an industry leader in data science and data management, Booz Allen has a long history of building analytics-driven, risk-based detection capabilities for law enforcement organizations, the intelligence community, and other federal and commercial clients. Leveraging this experience, as well as more than 20 years supporting law enforcement clients throughout the investigative lifecycle, we’ve put together a suite of investigative data management and analytics tools, combining them into a flexible, seamless ecosystem. It works across the enforcement lifecycle to give investigators the tools they need to focus on what matters most—uncovering crimes and identifying those responsible for them.

Our criminal investigation and law enforcement suite is designed to streamline the law enforcement lifecycle and improve case success rates. Its central features include: 

• Tool for decoding investigative data and automating investigative workflows
  One such product,  a message mapping app, frees agents from having to manually manipulate hundreds of thousands of rows in a dozen or more spreadsheets in order to map the communications patterns of a suspect. Instead, a map can be automatically generated with artificial intelligence and machine learning processes by simply uploading the relevant files into the app. What once took months now takes minutes. Similarly, rather than using paper or spreadsheets, agents can identify, organize, and track leads using a system that intakes data and generates lead reports. These and other applications are highly integrable with popular technology platforms and can be deployed on a small footprint in less than a day.

• A single platform for aggregating and sharing data at enterprise scale 
  Aggregating data across multiple sources empowers investigators to find connections that can’t be identified by looking at the same data sources on their own. With data engineering and analytics tools integrated on a single platform, agents can far more easily uncover links across sources by connecting disparate identifiers and tying them to a single person or entity. These connections and other analytics can be displayed via dashboards that are easy to understand and ideal for presenting cases to prosecutors.

• Curated data streams that help quickly evaluate the quality of investigative leads
  Early in an investigation, open source and commercial data can help quickly identify potential concerns around individuals or organizations. With our suite’s data subscription services, a quick search gives investigators vital information to help them determine the pedigree of a lead and whether it’s worth following, or whether a case is worth opening. 

Tools like Booz Allen’s criminal investigation and law enforcement suite help agents and criminal analysts move investigations forward more efficiently by eliminating frustrating technical and administrative data processing work. Less time spent crunching data and more time spent understanding a case leads to far better case closure rates. Our flexible platform allows law enforcement organizations to control access to data, to select and integrate the tools that meet their specific needs, and to deploy new tools to the field quickly. We’re ready to empower law enforcement agencies to meet evolving data needs and overcome the technological challenges that criminals hide behind.