CrimeFighter Investigator: A Novel Tool for Criminal Network Investigation

Abstract

Criminal network investigation involves a number of complex tasks and faces many problems. Overall tasks include collection, processing, and analysis of information, in which analysis is the key to successful use of information; it transforms raw data into intelligence. Problems such as information abundance or scarcity and information complexity are typically resolved by adding more manpower resources, inhibiting information sharing. This paper presents a novel tool that supports a human-centered, target-centric model for criminal network investigation. The developed tool provides more comprehensive support for analysis tasks than existing tools.

Effects of implicit sharing in collaborative analysis

“…Some of these tools have been evaluated with a small number of users and without comparison to alternative tools or to the same tool with design feature variations [3,9,34,40]. Others have evaluated tools in a solo study, failing to examine the collaborative aspects of the analysis task [23], or have not evaluated the tools with human participants at all [30,32,35]. Other tools require collaborators to manually decide what and when to share in a structured tabular format [12,13].…”

“…Most previous work evaluated collaborative analysis tools with a handful of participants without comparing tools to alternatives [3,9,34,40], by running a solo study [23], by studying explicit knowledge sharing [11,13], or have not evaluated the tools with human participants at all [30,32,35]. In this paper we present a methodical study that demonstrated the benefit of a specific design feature, implicit knowledge sharing, on the process and outcomes of a collaborative analysis task.…”

“…For example, CrimeFighter [30] supports sensemaking and dissemination by inducing participants to voluntarily share information. Another approach is to remind analysts to share relevant pieces of information with others, as in AnalyticStream [28].…”

CrimeFighter Investigator: Integrating synthesis and sense-making for criminal network investigation

“…Based on a specific target-centric model for intelligence analysis [12], we propose a generic process model for human-centered, target-centric criminal network investigation [13,14] in Figure 1.…”

Dynalink: A Framework for Dynamic Criminal Network Visualization

“…Recently, crime pattern analysis that utilizes social network information has received some attention [7] [8]. Combining the crime pattern theory that was established by the Brantinghams [9], lately SNA has become an important tool for criminologists seeking to understand the connections between patterns of interactions and criminal behaviors.…”