Big Data policing – here’s what it means

Law enforcement agencies have always aimed to stay one step ahead of the criminals to maintain an engaging social atmosphere in their jurisdictions. With exploding urban population, big data policing has come into the picture to aid the law enforcers.

In the last decade, urban areas across the world have kept growing. Towns are turning into cities and cities are evolving into megacities. Despite the dwindling rate of urban population growth in many countries, any increase in population is still adding to the burden on cities. This growth puts an enormous load on law enforcement agencies that strive to keep the city free of crime. The additional load of the population comes with a strain on unemployment rates that could drive the unemployed lot of people to harm the social well being of other residents in the area. The law enforcement agencies should hence be capable of managing and keeping track of such large populations with a limited workforce. Big data policing offers the solution to this problem.

The buzz around big data

Big data utilizes time-honored mathematical and statistical models to establish actionable insights based on the vast sets of data that is fed into it. It was initially conceived as a tool to provide interactive visuals of data available to us so that they can be understood better; essentially, it offered descriptive analytics. As big data found success in its descriptive task, there arose an opportunity to utilize the existing data to ‘predict’ future trends too. These predictive analytics applications built up the platform for big data implementation in some sectors. Thereafter these applications coupled with machine Learning could prescribe the actions to enable growth in a company. The prescriptive analytics tool brought about an immense change in perception of big data framework. From something, which could provide interactive charts and maps, big data analytics evolved into something that could understand the data and suggest actions based on it.

Big data policing

Law enforcement agencies are looking forward to employing big data tools to help them with their job. Police departments have begun consulting software companies for big data solution to fight crime. Some agencies have already put in a lot of effort to integrate big data into their ecosystem. The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) has set up a Real-Time Analysis Critical Response (RACR) System in collaboration with an IT firm, Palantir. The system incorporates a wide array of data like age, description, address, tattoos, gang affiliations, and vehicle ownership among many others. With just the first name and a physical description, the big data software can narrow down the suspects to a mere few. Automatic License Plate readers that use Natural Language Processing techniques to get the location of vehicles from live surveillance cameras can track down a vehicle in less than a minute. Using big data, LAPD generates crime heat maps daily that are a prediction of possible crimes by utilizing the tons of historical data and real-time indicators that the LAPD stores. Units are then deployed in sensitive areas to avoid any event of wrongdoing. This aspect of big data is astonishing. The attribute of predicting crime makes big data policing an invaluable resource in tackling anti-social elements and maintaining law and order in huge cities.