Pathways to identity: using visualization to aid law enforcement in identification tasks

The nature of identity has changed dramatically in recent years and has grown in complexity. Identities are defined in multiple domains: biological and psychological elements strongly contribute, but biographical and cyber elements also are necessary to complete the picture. Law enforcement is beginning to adjust to these changes, recognizing identity’s importance in criminal justice. The SuperIdentity project seeks to aid law enforcement officials in their identification tasks through research of techniques for discovering identity traits, generation of statistical models of identity and analysis of identity traits through visualization. We present use cases compiled through user interviews in multiple fields, including law enforcement, and describe the modeling and visualization tools design to aid in those use cases

Security visualization intelligence model for law enforcement investigations

Data analytic methods and techniques have proven crucial in aiding law enforcement investigations and day-to-day operations. However, the rise of cyber-attacks across transnational jurisdictions creates a challenge to share information across law enforcement agencies. Malware, Bitcoin and social media datasets are some examples. Security visualization is a solution to facilitate information sharing across jurisdictions comfortably in enhancing investigations without revealing the underlying sensitive raw data therefore, reducing the time spent on analysing and processing such large dataset. In this paper we introduce the "Security Visualization Intelligence (SVInt) framework", a visualization intelligence model for investigations and situation awareness deployed for the international law enforcement domain. We provide an effective user-centric visual method of analysing, sharing and exchanging complex datasets using visualization to aid law enforcement investigations. Attribution and evidence preservation without revealing the underlying raw data is the primary goal for SVInt. The SVInt framework provide visualizations of Bitcoin transaction relationships and threat map visualization showing top malware threats using geo-locations. It also provides expendable visualization features for future investigation demands. Finally, we provide possible future work within the law enforcement security visualization domain

MetricsVis: A Visual Analytics Tool for Evaluating Multidimensional Data

Visualization for multidimensional data is a popular topic and many methods have been created to visualize this type of data. We developed a visual analytics tool to visualize multidimensional data for two distinct fields: resource allocation in law enforcement departments and phenotype traits of sorghum crops. For law enforcement departments, we designed a visualization tool to measure and compare police officer’s experience in different types of crimes. Our tool supports the analysis of the amount of experience each officer has in each crime category. Meanwhile, the field crop modeling project requires the visualization of the measured value of multiple traits of each sorghum category. In general, our visualization tool is now able to represent these multidimensional data in multiple graphs and charts, with a rich interaction set of selecting, grouping, and filtering. MetricsVis has been expanded this summer with the addition of 6 new graphs, the ability to use the sorghum crops dataset, and more data manipulation features. By being able to explore the data through several graphs and charts at the same time, this allows the user to easily query the data or find peculiarities in the data that they would have otherwise missed. We describe several case studies to validate the importance of our tool in analyzing the data in both projects. In the future, we would like to expand our tool for other similar datasets

A Spatial Approach to Surveying Crime‐problematic Areas at the Street Level

Ponencias, comunicaciones y pósters presentados en el 17th AGILE Conference on Geographic Information Science "Connecting a Digital Europe through Location and Place", celebrado en la Universitat Jaume I del 3 al 6 de junio de 2014.Reaching far beyond the realm of geography and its related disciplines, spatial analysis and visualization tools now actively support the decision-making processes of law enforcement agencies. Interactive mapping of crime outperforms the previously manual and laborious querying of crime databases. Using burglary and robbery events reported in the urban city of Manchester, England, we illustrate the utility of graphical methods for interactive analysis and visualization of event data. These novel surveillance techniques provide insight into offending characteristics and changes in the offending process in ways that cannot be replicated by traditional crime investigative methods. We present a step-wise methodology for computing the intensity of aggregated crime events which can potentially accelerate law enforcers’ decision making processes by mapping concentrations of crime in near real time

Using Visual Capabilities to Improve Efficiency in Computer Forensic Analysis

Computer forensics is the preservation, analysis, and interpretation of computer data. Computer forensics is dependent on the availability of software tools and applications. Such tools are critical components in law enforcement investigations. Due to the diversity of cyber crime and cyber assisted crime, advanced software tools are essential apparatus for typical law enforcement investigators, national security analysts, corporate emergency response teams, civil lawyers, risk management personnel, etc. Typical tools available to investigators are text-based, which are sorely inadequate given the volume of data needing analysis in today’s environment. Many modern tools essentially provide simple GUIs to simplify access to typical textbased commands but the capabilities are essentially the same. For simplicity we continue to refer to these as text-based and command-based in constrast to the visualization tools and associated direct manipulation interfaces we are attempting to develop. The reading of such large volumes of textual information is extremely time-consuming in contrast with the interpretation of images through which the user can interpret large amounts of information simultaneously. Forensic analysts have a growing need for new capabilities to aid in locating files holding evidence of criminal activity. Such capabilities must improve both the efficiency of the analysis process and the identification of additionally hidden files. This paper discusses visualization research that more perceptually and intuitively represents file characteristics. Additionally, we integrate interaction capabilities for more complete exploration, significantly improving analysis efficiency. Finally, we discuss the results of an applied user study designed specifically to measure the efficacy of the developed visualization capabilities in the analysis of computer forensic related data

Classification and Visualization of Crime-Related Tweets

Millions of Twitter posts per day can provide an insight to law enforcement officials for improved situational awareness. In this paper, we propose a natural-language-processing (NLP) pipeline towards classification and visualization of crime-related tweets. The work is divided into two parts. First, we collect crime-related tweets by classification. Unlike written text, social media like Twitter includes substantial non-standard tokens or semantics. So we focus on exploring the underlying semantic features of crime-related tweets, including parts-of-speech properties and intention verbs. Then we use these features to train a classification model via Support Vector Machine. The second part is to utilize visual analytics approaches on collected tweets to analyze and explore crime incidents. We integrate the NLP pipeline with Social Media Analytics Reporting Toolkit (SMART) to improve the accuracy of crime-related tweets identification in SMART. This paper can also be utilized to improve crime prediction for law enforcement personnel

Shot dead: An in depth look at murders committed by law enforcement

The United States is filled with diversity; diversity of races, religions, laws, and violence. There is a disproportionate amount of black people murdered by the hands of law enforcement as compared to their white counterparts. The United States has a long history of racism and discrimination towards the black persons who live and visit the land. Thus it is important to truly analyze the trends of murderous violence by law enforcement to those who are within the United States. The raw numbers presented will accompany in painting a picture of how serious of an issue is present. The data visualization that has been chosen to bring this issue to life is an infographic. The infographic highlights how black people in America only make up thirteen percent of the overall population, but are five times more likely to be murdered by law enforcement. Black people are being targeted by law enforcement, therefore it is critical to bring about the injustices and disproportionate amount of fatal force brought onto black people. The goal is to spread around important information about the loss of lives of many people who have interactions with law enforcement and hopefully bring about change to the system.Ope