Analyzing Crime Data with Digital Evidence Management Software

Technology has become the driving force for crime prevention and control over the past couple of decades.

The proliferation of technology has completely revolutionized the strategies for law enforcement agencies to investigate, analyze and combat crimes.

Now they have many more digital tools at their disposal that enable them to deliver swift justice.

Now law enforcement agencies are using efficient tech tools to identify criminal activities and solve crimes faster with crime data analysis.

They are now looking forward to cutting down the crime rates and making the world a peaceful place using the power of technology-oriented crime data analysis.

But what even is crime data analysis? That’s the big question.

What is Crime Data Analysis?

The thing about crime data analysis is that it doesn’t have one definition that everyone agrees on. There are several renditions based on who is defining the term.

But, in the broadest sense, crime analysis is basically the process or practice of identifying patterns and trends in criminal activity, producing insights that help deploy appropriate and timely resources and guide investigators towards justice.

According to the International Association of Crime Analysts,

"Crime data analysis is the process in which a set of quantitative and qualitative techniques are used to analyze data valuable to police agencies. It includes the analysis of crime and criminals, investigation, patrol activities crime prevention and reduction strategies and evaluation of police efforts." 

In fact, data analysis is about revealing hidden insights from data and transforming them into actionable, usable information.

Importance of Crime Data Analysis

Law enforcement agencies are increasingly recognizing the need for crime data analysis.

The FBI has even opened up a Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP) that provides analytical tools and allows law enforcement professionals, first-responders, investigators, etc. to come together for secure collaboration and information sharing.

With increasing digitization, the police have more big data to analyze. It is stated that:

"The world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day."

Therefore, crime data analysis plays a much bigger role in investigations and delivering justice than ever before.

Using digital data, law enforcement officers can look at the bigger picture with digital evidence unveiling the hidden aspects of certain crimes that were not visible before.

Criminals tend to leave many digital traces of their crimes. Maybe they get caught in a CCTV camera. Maybe a concerned citizen captures pictures or videos of suspicious activity. Digital forensics speed up the process of identifying fingerprints and DNA as well.

All this raw data is just that – raw data. To make actionable information out of it, crime data analysis needs to be incorporated.

Furthermore, by analyzing the patterns in crime, law enforcement can effectively deploy resources to prevent similar criminal activities in the future, until the criminals innovate new ways to commit crimes and the cycle repeats.

Therefore, crime data analysis is important in modern law enforcement because there is a lot of raw data in digital evidence that is hiding useful insights that can help prevent crime in the future.

Challenges of Crime Data Analysis

One of the major challenges is that not every law enforcement agency can afford to hire dedicated crime analysts full-time.

But, with the ubiquity of modern cutting-edge technology, that shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

Technology is getting more affordable yet more capable by the minute. As mentioned above, Law Enforcement Enterprise Portal (LEEP) is a massive leap in enabling collaboration and sharing the resources across different law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Another major challenge is that the entire process of crime data analysis is very time-consuming.

Most time-sensitive cases don’t allow enough time for analysis and the officers and investigators have to make fast decisions. This is true because data lives in disparate silos and takes a while to reconcile.

Impact of Technology on Crime Data Analysis 

According to the FBI's 2020 Incident-Based Crime Data Report, nearly 8.9 million criminal offences were reported in 2020. 

It raises a need to have competent systems for crime data analysis based on technological innovations.

These systems help to identify the types of crimes and their transparency in the United States through comprehensive data reporting.

Let's have a clear picture of these systems and their impact on crime data analysis.

Rapid Identification Systems

Massive data augmentation demands rapid identification systems. Police officers can quickly see the criminal history of people. 

They are now using fingerprints, facial recognition, and palm prints to recognize specific individuals with criminal records.

Detection, Monitoring and Positioning Systems

Nowadays, law enforcement officers can detect any criminal activity in no time by using detection, monitoring and positioning systems.

• For instance, they are using drones frequently to observe any area, and capture screenshots and videos to provide useful digital evidence for investigation.

• Global Positioning Systems (GPS) help to locate criminals and officers easily and rapidly.

• Surveillance cameras are now widely used everywhere to capture live incidents or unusual activities in a particular area. Such as CCTV etc. 

• Data Mapping provides agencies to have a clear geographical view of crimes, their types and frequency to track common crimes and develops a strategy accordingly to reduce crimes.

• Along with this, they are using digital evidence management tools to store and manage digital evidence collected from a variety of sources which cuts down manual hours and helps to solve cases faster.

Learn more: Latest Trends in Public Safety Technology For 2022

Modern investigations involve overwhelming volumes of digital evidence, from crime scene photos to dashcam recordings to CCTV footage.

Not only that, there are the incident details stored separately in RMS and CAD systems, but the relevant digital evidence is also stored disparately in local drives as well. Reconciling all that digital data takes a lot of time and effort.

This is a challenge that can be solved by using the right technology!

Modern digital evidence management systems not only consolidate all the digital evidence files in a centralized repository, but they also integrate with the evidence collection systems and the RMS and CAD solutions to link all the data together.

Plus, a decent digital evidence management system comes with artificial intelligence capabilities and GIS evidence mapping that considerably streamlines the entire analysis process.

Modern technology gives law enforcement agencies more analytical power with more time to execute the information that the analysis produces.

Want to know about VIDIZMO's Digital Evidence Management System (DEMS) capabilities?

How to Streamline the Process of Crime Data Analysis With VIDIZMO DEMS?

VIDIZMO provides a robust centralized platform Digital Evidence Management System that offers secure storage and management of digital evidence and assists in crime data analysis procedures.

On top of that, it can integrate with various CMS, RMS and other third-party systems to provide you with complete software as per your requirements.

VIDIZMO is recognized in IDC MarketScape which is trusted for its remarkable features such as redaction of PII, multilingual transcription using artificial intelligence, and a wide range of deployment options.

Its features are listed below:

• Collection of digital evidence from various sources such as CCTV, drone cams, dashcams, body-worn and other storage devices.

• Flexible deployment options include on-premises, on the cloud (Commercial/Government), and in the hybrid infrastructure.

• In terms of security, it offers FIPS-Compliant end-to-end encryption, role-based access control, secure sharing options, access reason provisioning and a lot more.

• Integration with your existing applications such as CMS, RMS, Safari, Google Chrome etc.

• Maintenance of comprehensive chain of custody for digital evidence and audit logs to keep track of actions performed on them.

• Automatically detect, track and redact personally identifiable information in digital files using artificial intelligence.

and the list does not end here...

We offer much more beyond your expectations!

or better try it yourself for better understanding!