Intelligence management plays a vital role in all policing activities as it increases the effectiveness and performance of policing services in a number of ways. It supports collaboration and information sharing, enables the use of analytics to strengthen intelligence-led policing and helps increase public confidence.
Intelligence management software can help law enforcement agencies to take advantage of the new data mining technologies available and marry those technologies to the street knowledge that had been gathered in the past by the cop walking the beat. Rather than relevant information being limited to a few, data mining techniques allow critical information to be collected from your whole jurisdiction and analysed from a wide variety of perspectives to help you achieve your specific objectives. The benefit of this accumulation and concentration of data is efficiency on multiple levels.
Intelligence management software takes over the sheer magnitude of sifting through tens of thousands of individual pieces of data relating to criminal activity. By automating data collection and analysis, less personnel are needed to do the “grunt” work of connecting the dots. All relevant data that has been entered into the system is available for your inspection, no files left in a filing cabinet in the basement somewhere. Data can be rapidly analysed from different scenarios and perspectives. Data is presented in visual format which allows you to see patterns more easily in large collections of data. Moreover, this real-time data can be sent directly to mobile phones for in-car computers to alert officers of potential threats or impending dangers in specific geographic areas. Essentially, this predictive policing technology is at work to give decision-makers the ability to see where the most needed resources are in a community and to apply the necessary officers to that region.
You save money and make best use of resources with intelligence management software because you can pinpoint more specifically the areas that need increased attention. Another best use of resources is that your database contains profiles of who does what types of crimes, allowing you to focus your initial investigations on the most likely suspects. Detecting crime trends earlier allows you to address them sooner and reduce the adverse impacts they have on your community. Being able to look at all the components of crime, such as time of day, weather, location and type of crime, allows you correlate patterns of activity and anticipate possible future combination of those factors to anticipate criminal activity. What if you could sift through tips looking for patterns? Maybe a crime has twelve different vehicles described by various tips, but looking at all the tips, you could more easily and quickly see what the predominant vehicle description was, with a higher probability of being correct.
