Criminal Network Analysis inside Law Enforcement Agencies: A Data-Mining System Approach under the National Intelligence Model

Abstract

All police forces in the UK, and many Forces in Europe and the USA, use the National Intelligence Model as a means to provide relevant, timely and actionable intelligence. Increased awareness of the benefits that criminal network analysis provides in discovering, analysing and visualising networked criminal activity has become an integral part of the intelligence model. Despite numerous research efforts, technology has not achieved the expected improvements in the quality of criminal network analysis intelligence and the time needed to create related intelligence products. As current tools focus on the provision of structural metrics in describing networked crime activity and neglect the integration with Force prioritisation tactics, intelligence outputs from current automated tools rarely produce immediately applicable intelligence products, but leave an operational gap between intelligence analyst and police officers, and numerous manual tasks for the analyst. Using the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining, a database agnostic data-mining methodology, we propose a common standard to provide a structured approach to the manifold of analytical tasks in the process of criminal network analysis and show how those tasks relate to the intelligence model. We aim to depict the specific issues at each stage of the process and show how better results can be achieved through better integration of criminal network analysis and the intelligence cycle.