A Relation Context Oriented Approach to Identify Strong Ties in Social Networks
October 1, 2009 Analytics, Law EnforcementLi Ding, Dana Steil, Brandon Dixon, Allen Parrish, David Brown; Annals of Information Systems, Oct. 2009
Social network graphs have been found to be an extremely effective tool in the identification of potential perpetrators of criminal activity. These graphs can grow extremely large, as illustrated by an example within this paper that contained over 4.9 million nodes and over 211 million edges. Obviously some reduction of these graphs is essential to their being useful. Further, considerable "noise" (false positive relationships) are generated when the graphs are totally comprehensive. This research transformed the original social network into a relational context-oriented edge-dual graph. This was done by evaluating the quality of the connectivity for each edge to obtain a metric to this effect for each edge. By retaining only the strongest edges the overall graph becomes more reliable and more useful in practice.
PerpSearch: An Integrated Crime Detection System
June 8, 2009 Health and Human Services, Law EnforcementLi Ding, Dana Steil, Matthew Hudnall, Brandon Dixon, Randy Smith, David Brown, Allen Parrish, IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics, Dallas, TX, Jun. 8 - Jun. 11, 2009.
This paper presents the first attempt to integrate four distinct approaches to solving crimes, all of which have proven their value when applied independently, namely: (1) geographic assessment, (2) social networking, (3) crime pattern analysis, and (4) physical description match. The system that integrates these four search techniques, called PerpSearch, takes a description of the crime, including its locations and all other known aspects (e.g., physical characteristics of suspects, vehicles, etc.), and runs it all through the PerpSearch engine components, where they are combined to produce a score for each potential suspect. By using past data on crimes prior to solution and comparing the results against the eventual known perpetrators, the system can be fine tuned and validated. A prototype has been implemented using current Alabama criminal and demographic databases.
IRAS: An Inmates’ Risk Assessment System
June 1, 2009 Health and Human Services, Law EnforcementLi Ding, Brandon Dixon, Allen Parrish, International Journal of Computers and Their Applications, Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2009
This research had the goal of improving the classification of offenders into their different levels of risk in order to improve the decision-making process with regard to diversion programs (i.e., alternatives to incarceration). The system is based on an automated assessment of the likelihood of recidivism based on nine weighted attributes. The system can easily be tested by running it on past historical data and then comparing the results with the observation of more recent outcomes. This was pilot tested using data from Madison County, Alabama.
Analysis of the Wet vs. Dry Counties within Alabama (pdf)
January 31, 2009 Analytics, Health and Human Services, Law EnforcementBrown, D., CAPS Research Report, Jan. 31, 2009.
CARE IMPACT analyses were performed to compare 13 dry counties with 13 wet counties over their various crash characteristics for a recent five-year (2003-2007) time period. The results fall into two logical categories: those that compare the demographics of the counties and those that compare the crash characteristics with regard to alcohol. A few of the nearly 200 attribute comparisons are presented in this report in order to guide the future direction of the research project.
A Review of Youth-Alcohol Traffic Crashes in Alabama During CY 2007 (pdf)
January 15, 2009 Law Enforcement, Motor Vehicles, Traffic SafetyBrown, D., A. Watkins, CAPS Research Report, Jan. 15, 2009.
As part of their youth-alcohol program, the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs requested a special study to focus on the development of Youth-DUI countermeasures. This report is in three sections. The first is a summary of recommended countermeasures in prioritized order based upon estimated cost-benefit. The recommendations are based upon the detailed analysis performed for Alabama and reviews of potential countermeasures given in the literature. The second and third sections of this report provide the detailed data analysis that was originally performed for the State of Alabama for CY (calendar year) 2003. These have been updated using CY 2007 data.