The real Minority Report: Rochester Police Department uses IBM tech to stop crimes before they happen

IBM i2 and Identity Insight have proved 'game-changing' says captain

The ability to predict the future has long been the stuff of science fiction or, more often, pure fantasy, with hard science usually finding it difficult to rationalise there ever being a way to use technology to foretell what is to come.

But IBM is tackling the problem in a measured way via big data analytics, offering a range of products that, in a limited but surprisingly encouraging way, is allowing the police department of Richmond, Virginia to begin actually stopping crimes before they happen.

Captain of services, Tim Heroff, described how Rochester Police Department has been “swimming in information” for quite some years now, but finding a way to make sense of it all has always been “a great challenge”.

But using the technology available now, which includes IBM’s Identity Insight product and law enforcement and fraud prevention software i2, which IBM acquired in 2011, “has been a real game-changer in law enforcement,” said Heroff.

“About three years ago we introduced a new paradigm called Intelligence-Led Policing, and one of the tenets of ILP is that a very small percentage of offenders are actually responsible for the majority of crime,” explained Heroff.

Identify those individuals and focus your departments resources on these “most serious and prolific offenders,” said Heroff, “and you’re going to have a significant impact on the crime rate in your area.”

Not only that, but connect enough information together, and it actually becomes possible to use logical data connections to quite literally stop crimes before they happen.

Using IBM’s InfoSphere Identity Insight product, Henoff explained how Rochester PD is first of all able to process “who is who” in its existing data management systems. This is a tougher challenge than it looks because, as Heroff explained, “identity resolution can be problematic when people don’t always tell us the truth. They sometimes switch out their name, or date of birth, or other identifying information.”

As many as six different people in the police computer can turn out to be the same person, but InfoSphere teases this out by focusing on connections between these named individuals.

“It helps us to understand who knows him, who he has relationships with – non-obvious relationships,” explained Heroff.

But even then, trying to express these connections in a way police personnel untrained in hardcore data analysis can understand is a challenge in itself. This is where i2 comes in.

“Using i2, we can present this information in a visual manner, and it’s incredible,” enthused Heroff. “It allows us to display the relationships like a spider’s web, and it becomes quite apparent why this particular individual was at the scene of a crime; it’s because the vehicle that was there was owned by a person he’s associated with. We have all this information in the management systems already, but it would take a great deal of time and effort to find it all manually. With this tool we can visually see the environment we are dealing with.”

The visual system is so simple and easy to use that if an investigating officer “finds something interesting, they can click on an icon, whether it’s a person or a vehicle or a location,” said Heroff.

The real Minority Report: Rochester Police Department uses IBM tech to stop crimes before they happen

IBM i2 and Identity Insight have proved 'game-changing' says captain

"And then that's another layer of information, and another degree of separation. And suddenly you're able to connect all these dots."

Heroff explained that, though the old adage "knowledge is power" holds true, there has traditionally at Rochester PD "been a wall between the investigative division and patrol division".

However, since the advent of ILP and its introduction of IBM's solutions, "that wall has come down with the advent of intelligence sharing."

It's not happened without its own obstacles, though: while technology can adapt instantly, the people using it can't always keep up.

"We're able to provide information on a daily basis at briefings now, but it's been a challenge in that we're changing culture. Tools we are using weren't necessarily designed for law enforcement, so we're trying to use business tools to adapt to our purposes," said Heroff, who enthused that IBM's new version of i2 - showcased here at IOD 2013 in New Vegas - looks "much easier for our patrol officers to use".

But perhaps the biggest bugbear in implementing ILP at Rochester has been financial. Whenever a spend is requested, it's not long before ROI [return on investment] is discussed. In law enforcement, explains Henoff, such a calculation isn't always so easy.

"ROI was actually a significant topic when we went to the city council and said we wanted to purchase a tool that was, frankly, quite expensive," explained Heroff.

"And they said ‘How do we know it's going to be a good investment?' It was diffcult for us to come up with a percentage ROI that would produce a business metric, because what we've been trying to do is prevent things from happening. Being able to measure something that doesn't happen is a difiicult thing. But we are dedicated to doing the best we can to eliminate crime, and prevent crime, and sometimes investments have to be made to do that."

"Probably the best argument is: how do you put a price on safety?" Heroff explained a basic scenario where, should an officer be approaching a stopped vehicle with minimal intel, the level of knowledge of its occupant could seriously change the situation's outcome.

"If an officer stops what he thinks is a grandmother's car, he may actually find it's being driven by her granddaughter or, as [the granddaughter] has poor judgement when it comes to men, she actually hangs out with a guy who's one of our serious and prolific offenders. Through [the ILP] process we are able to know this when the officer walks up to the car."

"If we don't have the ability to protect ourselves, how do we protect the citizens we serve? We're not in the business to make money," said Heroff.

"It's difficult to measure return on investment, but we are certainly trying to deliver the right information to the right officer at the right time."