Intelligent Systems Report € July € 1996 € Volume 13€ No. 7

Fighting crime with intelligent systems

By David Blanchard
Editor

While intelligent systems typically are applied to business and industrial problems, the technology has a long and proud history in the venue of law enforcement. One of the best-known expert systems, for instance, is the U.S. Department of Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which identifies potential money laundering schemes and which has processed 200,000 transactions per week since March 1993 (see ISR, September 1995). The U.S. Customs Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, and a number of state and local agencies have also adopted intelligent systems as an effective tool in fighting crimes of all sorts.

Recently, Harlequin Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.), a vendor of Lisp-based symbolic processing and electronic publishing solutions, spun off its own investigative consulting service, under the lofty title of Harlequin Bureau of Investigation (Boston, Mass.). HBI has developed an intelligent system-based service designed to troubleshoot and investigate white collar crime and corporate fraud on an international scale (Harlequin also has an office in England). HBI specializes in analysis and research of a client's computer-generated information to support fund tracing and forensic accountancy work. Intelligent software engineering techniques are employed to unravel deception and false accounting work.

HBI boasts that it can help investigators establish how and why fraud has taken place. For instance, thanks to intelligent data mining technology, HBI can extract hidden relationships from what may initially seem like unconnected facts and figures. This exposed information can be converted into a graphical form suitable as presentable evidence.

"A case can be examined, analyzed and vital information exposed in a matter of hours instead of weeks, or perhaps even months," said Richard Mills, director of HBI and formerly on the directing staff at the UK-based Home Office Crime Prevention Centre. In particular, HBI can identify and research:

• associations and relationships between company and corporate directors, as well as shareholders and registered companies;
  
  
• formal and informal infrastructure of corporate organizations;
  
  
• financial transactions;
  
  
• formal and informal communications networks; and
  
  
• database comparison for common associations.

HBI has also launched a pre-trial preparation service designed specifically for attorneys and legal practitioners. HBI is offering specialist analysis and examination of any investigative database, including HOLMES (the UK's Home Office Major Enquiry System) database, which focuses on techniques that handle: audit and data integrity; circumstances and events; discrepancies with conflicting witness statements; the events which have taken place and in chronological order; areas where vital information may be missing; and complex links in the case data in order to analyze and explore possible relationships either by association, time or a combination of both.

According to Mills, HBI staff, using Harlequin technology, were recently able to identify five witnesses who were material in a murder investigation in one hour. Other technologies and investigators had been unable to find these persons.


Neural networks help Canadian police
Meanwhile, Excalibur Technologies Corp. (San Diego, Calif.), a supplier of neural network-based pattern recognition and information retrieval systems, has formed a partnership with DKW Systems Corp. (Calgary, Alb., Canada), an information systems development and systems integration firm, to develop and deliver advanced worldwide information management systems for police and other law enforcement organizations. DKW will integrate Excalibur's RetrievalWare family of software components into DKW's Canadian Law Enforcement Information Management System (CLEIMS). DKW will market the integrated system to law enforcement agencies worldwide.

CLEIMS has been developed in cooperation with the largest national and municipal law enforcement organizations in Canada under the sponsorship of the Canadian Police Research Council. The National Research Council provided a grant of over $100,000 to fund the preliminary R&D efforts. The first version of the system is in beta testing with municipal and national law enforcement agencies, and is scheduled for commercial release next month.

The system enables electronic storage, search, retrieval and management of law enforcement-related investigative and administrative information from centralized data repositories within interconnected local-area, wide-area and mobile national law enforcement computer networks. CLEIMS will enable law enforcement organizations to better locate evidence and share information, increasing the productivity and effectiveness of law enforcement agencies, while streamlining labor and cost.

The Excalibur/DKW partnership, which encompasses Excalibur's full-text retrieval capabilities, will extend to include Excalibur's family of retrieval solutions for non-text data, including fingerprint, graphic, video, audio and user-defined data.