SPSS - Customers

West Midlands Police Dept.

Challenge

Determine a way to quickly and easily find patterns and trends in unsolved criminal cases.

Solution

With PASW Modeler's rapid modeling environment for data mining, the West Midlands, U.K. police department works to identify key case patterns and trends in hopes of solving old cases and identifying new criminal behavioral patterns.

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Shrinking resources, few leads and aging cases complicate the fight against crime. At the West Midlands, U.K., police department, investigators find these challenges limit the cases they can tackle. High-volume cases without definite leads, such as house burglaries and vehicle theft that lack clear evidence, are often filed away until new evidence is found.

And in its daily battle against crime, the West Midlands police department finds an atypical ally in data mining, says Inspector Rick Adderley.

Each West Midlands electronic case file contains physical descriptions of the thieves as well as their modus operandi (MO). While many cases lacking evidence were previously filed away, the department is now re-examining them, and doing it more quickly than ever before. In PASW Modeler, Adderley uses two Kohonen networks to cluster similar physical descriptions and MOs. He then combines clusters to see whether groups of similar physical descriptions
coincide with groups of similar MOs. If he finds a good match, and perpetrators are known for one or more of the offenses, it is possible the unsolved cases were committed by the same individuals.

Adderley’s analytical team further investigates the clusters, using statistical methods to verify the similarities’ importance. If clusters indicate the same criminal might be at work, the department is likely to re-open and investigate the other crimes. Or, if the criminal is unknown but a large cluster indicates the same offender, the leads from these cases can be combined–and the case reprioritized.

Adderley is also investigating the behavior of prolific repeat offenders, with the goal of identifying crimes that seem to fit their behavioral pattern. “We hope PASW Modeler will allow us to re-open a few of those old cases, and provide some unexpected connections to known perpetrators.”

If I can build a model using data in which the offender is known, then we can apply that model to the database of unsolved crimes. Once we determine that such models work, this could give us an invaluable aid in linking known criminals to specific crimes quickly.
Rick Adderley
Inspector
West Midlands U.K. Police Department