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Keeping weapons in check around Europe
Ian Manocha, Managing Director, SAS UK, explains how the Odyssey Project will help tackle gun crime across country borders. Ian is also the head of SAS’ international public security business.
Globalisation has unfortunately been accompanied by a dramatic increase in organised and transnational crime and terrorism. It takes many forms and includes murder, genocide, honour killings, trafficking in drugs, weapons, smuggling of human beings and laundering of the proceeds of crime. These threats undermine the democratic and economic basis of societies so there is an increasingly desperate need for countries to work together to keep this type of activity in check.
Cooperation across the European Union is vital to try and reduce international criminal activity. While there is both political and operational commitment to share data and no shortage of ballistics and crime information data, there is currently no technical means to do this. As a result, Project Odyssey, an EU R&D project to develop a ballistic crime data sharing system, has recently been completed.
The Odyssey platform links crimes and weapons using advanced analytics technology, promoting mutual co-operation and knowledge sharing between police, security and intelligence professionals across Europe. It will make it easier to identify guns and potentially criminals as they move between jurisdictions. By constantly monitoring new data and current items of concern the system will ‘Red Flag’ potential matches so as to alert policing professionals in the relevant EU member states.
Odyssey: the beginning
The Odyssey prototype was developed by a team of experts ranging from police, computer scientists and researchers and makes use of SAS analytics software to drive key components of the system. The aim of the project is to analyse and process crime information and ballistics data to help understand criminal networks without country boundaries.
The prototype platform was coordinated by Sheffield Hallam University and was supported by a number of other security agencies including EUROPOL. If implemented, the system would need to gather data from a very large number of law enforcement agencies in the EU. This would allow the network to record and share a significant amount of information about gun crime in one single secure system, ensuring benefits across Europe.
Anschutz or Beretta?
Ballistics information relating to the types of weapons, bullets and cartridges recovered from crime scenes is critical to the project’s success. Projectiles have unique characteristics like size, shape and texture which can be used to differentiate between one weapon and another. This means that the characteristics of a crime scene can be profiled and compared to others that are similar with respect to the nature of the crime, suspects, weapons and other evidence.
Traditionally, finding links between crimes has been an incredibly complex, time consuming and difficult process that often involved physical transport of evidence and manual searching of data. A lack of standards for data acquisition, match declarations and different input methods between organisations and geographies makes the matching process tricky and often unreliable. Odyssey Project has addressed this issue by bringing information from police, security and intelligence organisations across Europe together into the same system in the same format.
A key feature of the fight against gun crime is to identify large-scale patterns and undertake data mining to identify key issues - for instance the sudden arrival of new arms or ammunition in crime across Europe. Identifying such patterns can lead to identifying the source of the arms and cutting off the supply through police action, border security action or international political and economic action.
The analysis of the collected ballistic crime data uses a prediction, detection and modelling system from SAS to gain an understanding of criminal networks around Europe. The data is analysed using algorithms and semantics to understand its meaning by reporting back on patterns. This extracts meaningful data that the team can use to determine the distribution of gun crime. Ballistics data that appears to map to similar incidents is then flagged up instantly to show connections between crimes, allowing agencies to share and cross-reference information based on more accurate evidence. Similarly, agents in other geographies are automatically alerted to matches on gun and bullet signatures so they can build a profile of crime networks that may affect their area.
To the future and beyond
Odyssey Project has just reached the end-point of its first stage of development. Over this period the team has worked to get to grips with the data collection problems faced by agencies tracking and managing criminal investigations involving firearms and has used this insight to develop best practices for data collection to ensure smooth coordination across Europe. Using this information, it has been able to build a prototype computer architecture to help integrate the variety of systems to ensure that information held is secure, securely exchanged but useable for complex cross jurisdiction matching.
