Data Mining In Law Enforcement

jcatcw points out a blog entry by Scott McPherson, CIO for the Florida House of Representatives. McPherson condemns the state of data sharing and data mining in law enforcement, saying that the US causes itself a great deal of trouble by focusing more on "antiterror armor and nuke-sniffing devices" than a useful information distribution network. He discusses a few such projects, and how they could have directly affected the events of 9/11. Quoting: "One of those ingenious things that actually worked, Seisint founder Hank Asher's brilliant MATRIX system, remains mired in controversy and politics. Hank showed me MATRIX just a few short weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Using law enforcement data and commercial data, all of the commercial data available in the public domain, Asher's query produced [hijacker Mohamed] Atta's photo -- and about 80 others, many of them fellow 9/11 hijackers, many of them associates of the 9/11 hijackers. It was simple data mining and algorithms, and none of the information was obtained illegally."

Comments

Islands of Automation

[rlp]

I've worked in the field of law enforcement data sharing. Fact is that most law enforcement agencies are either islands of automation or very loosely connected to other agencies. The stuff you see in TV and movies ("24") is a fantasy. Adjacent towns and cities rarely share information, and this lack of knowledge can put members of their police force in danger (for instance when making a traffic stop). A few years ago, the DOJ kicked off a sharing initiative with the Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM). This is an XML based specification for exchanging law enforcement data that was developed at Georgia Tech. I was involved in an initiative in Ohio to share police record management system information at a state level. The system was deployed and is operational today. GJXDM has been superseded by the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). It should be noted that the NIEM model is even more complex than it's predecessor and tends to break many XML tools. The data exchanged tends to be fairly rudimentary and fairly sparse - arrests, bookings, warrants. Nevertheless, most agencies, and most states have either not implemented data sharing or are in the earliest stages of doing so.