Crime Analytics

Across the US, and around the world, crime is trending up and violence is increasing. Increases in violent crime and murders require law enforcement agencies to tackle crime fighting with new tactics. IBM has the tools to help law enforcement agencies surface leads, enable a better deployed universe of people to do their job, and improve officer safety and reduce crime.

The benefits of our approach speak for themselves. In New York City, case closings are 25% higher than the national average, partly due to the new analytic tools available to investigators. In addition, crime has dropped 20% since 2002 in spite of a decrease of 3,000 officers.

Investigative analytics are helping detectives solve cases quickly: A recent Amber Alert closed within four hours culminating with the safe return of the child. A cold-case homicide from 1989 was solved in just a few days using the Crime Information Warehouse.

To improve public safety and prevent crimes, police agencies need to harness the volumes of data from multiple systems allowing coordination of data across departments. For three decades, public safety systems have been good at collecting data, but seldom have the disparate systems been able to effectively share information. These information silos trap data and prevent the timely analysis and identification of department-wide patterns. Only recently has there been the capacity to gather multiple data sources into a single analytic environment and then mine the data for patterns, trends and critical information.

The IBM Crime Information Warehouse (PDF, 96KB) can position government agencies to optimize police work and improve public safety by using advanced data analysis tools to integrate data from its disparate systems. The Crime Information Warehouse provides state, county and city police departments with a well-organized, fast, and easy to access analytical tool and a repository of statistics and reports. This unique system can integrate any law enforcement information source such as incidents, offenses, arrests, and calls for service for use by officers and managers to better investigate crimes, and to make timely and informed decisions about force deployment. From a single interface, users of the Crime Information Warehouse (CIW) can access and share information in a multitude of formats.

The new technology is already beginning to change the culture of how crime is solved in several jurisdictions across the United States.