Fighting Crime With Databases

What's good for Wal-Mart is good for the nation and that business intelligence strategy is now turning up all over the place. "The issue for a lot of companies is how to get more value from the data they have," notes Anne Milley, director of analytics for SAS, a major player in supplying the systems behind the technology. "The answers are all in the numbers, and in doing so the ripples are spreading out to crime detection, anti-terrorism, air quality monitoring and surveillance." From mapping the human genome, to bringing drugs to market faster, to cutting costs in servicing ATMs, to better predicting hurricanes, the need to capture more data and compare it to a wider range of variables is growing exponentially, says Milley. And public policy is seeing some benefits. Policing is a prime example. Earlier this year a bedazzled Rodney Munroe, chief of the Richmond, Va. police service, accepted the 2007 Business Intelligence Award for Excellence from Gartner, a leading information technology research and advisory company, at a black tie Chicago event. The award usually goes to innovative business applications, but judges were impressed with how Munroe turned analytics into a formidable crime-fighting tool. When Munroe took over as chief two years ago, his department was drowning in crime and data. Police had a mass of data from 911 calls and crime reports; what they didn’t have was a way to connect the dots and see a pattern of behaviour. Using some sophisticated software and hardware they started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/data-mining.html [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 8, 2007]

Note: http://www.cbc.ca/news/...