Mastering Data Management

Law enforcement must connect data from multiple silos to effectively catch criminals.

In my previous posts, we’ve defined "entity resolution" and examined how the Intelligence Community leverages the technology. This time around, we’ll discuss the challenges faced by the Integrated Law Enforcement community.

The Integrated Law Enforcement (ILE) community includes federal, state and local agencies each with their own stovepipes of data. The activities of ILE are comparable to the IC in that analysts/officers are looking for entities of interest in an investigative capacity.

The threats are also similar. The target can be an individual offender, an organization (such as gangs), individual terrorists or terrorist cells and the members that compose it. The difference is that ILE investigators deal exclusively with crimes.

ILE usually tracks different information than the IC. For example, crimes are tracked as their own entity to identify activities that are similar in nature. And, data about criminals such as known associates, vehicles, and tattoos or other marks are usually collected.

The ILE community’s challenge is finding a known entity when data resides across multiple data silos. These silos arise because of the program- and application-centric nature of law enforcement technology implementations. Each agency has data about individuals within its jurisdiction who have been convicted of or charged with criminal activity.

Ideally data would be integrated to allow ILE organizations and agents to obtain a holistic, entity-centric view of the item of interest, while upholding privacy laws and controlling access based on need to know.

Entity resolution can tie these stovepipes together to create a complete view of each person of interest, while allowing the data to stay under the control of its data owner.

Since the majority of the entities within ILE data sets are citizens, a high value is placed upon adherence to privacy and security relative to the data and the rights of individuals. Data about citizens that are criminals cannot be shared with intelligence agencies.

However, an alert system could be deployed that would let an intelligence investigator know that an ILE database contains information that might be of interest to them, so that they could pursue access to that information through the appropriate legal channels.

Also, as in the IC, the environment at the inter-organizational level of ILE is one of low trust, despite standing mandates to share information more fully across organizations. An entity resolution technology implementation that provides a way for data owners to share their information without releasing control is more likely to be successful.

Next, we’ll examine how immigration and border control agencies can keep out the bad guys.