Police are using Nucleik & ORA social network analysis tools for surveillance.

At a recent intelligence briefing in Springfield, State Trooper Stephen Gregorczyk learned that a local drug dealer had been robbed and was looking for revenge. Knowing little about the dealer, Gregorczyk turned to a new software tool that gathers all intelligence and background information about a suspect onto a single platform.

“I walked back to my desk,” he said, “typed in the name, and boom:” Every known location for the dealer, every brush with law enforcement, and every person ever linked to him popped up in one neat view on Gregorczyk’s computer screen.

The intelligence chief of a special unit combatting gang violence in the Western Massachusetts city, Gregorczyk now had a road map to plot how his team could head off the dealer before something bad happened.

“In this situation, we have the ability to stop a shooting before it happens,” Gregorczyk said.

Called Nucleik, the software is being tested by Gregorczyk and his gang unit. Nucleik is the brainchild of three Harvard University engineering students who hatched it as a class project for a professor with friends in law enforcement. The students were struck by how little technology was used by police to organize all the information they gather in their surveillance of gangs.

“We’re seeing these guys fighting crime everyday, putting their lives on the line everyday, but they’re not doing it with the right tools,” said Scott Crouch, cofounder of Nucleik.

So they set about to create a single platform for multiple uses, whether as a mobile app used in the field for street-level info or as a powerful desktop tool that could sift through mountains of data. The Springfield gang unit has been trying out the first version of Nucleik since mid-summer.

“Normally you’d need probably five pieces of software to do all of this and it would take hours. Now with one software, it takes minutes,” said Crouch.

For example, Nucleik could match disparate information to identify only those gang members of a certain age that frequented a particular address; the system can also display a criminal network graphically, allowing police to see the far-flung connections among gang members, drug dealers, financiers, and information spreaders.

“Police officers are wasting time every day using so many different software products, filling out so many reports,” said Matt Polega, another Nucleik co-founder. “And that’s time that they could spend back out in the field protecting our neighborhoods.”

Law enforcement has been collecting and learning from crime data for decades, and early on have used such information for major breakthroughs — determining that most crimes in a given jurisdiction occur at just a small number of locations, for example.

There are three primary tasks law enforcement information and intelligence systems should be able to do, said Kathleen Carley, professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research and chief executive of the company that handles the off-the-shelf version of ORA, a widely used social network analysis tool. One task is to gather information quickly, then present it visually and analyze it to identify useful links — such as those among the drug dealer in Springfield and his street associates.

ORA is a dynamic meta-network assessment and analysis tool developed by CASOS at Carnegie Mellon.  It contains hundreds of social network, dynamic network metrics, trail metrics, procedures for grouping nodes, identifying local patterns, comparing and contrasting networks, groups, and individuals from a dynamic meta-network perspective. ORA has been used to examine how networks change through space and time,  contains procedures for moving back and forth between trail data (e.g. who was where when) and network data (who is connected to whom,  who is connected to where …),  and has a variety of geo-spatial network metrics, and change detection techniques.  ORA can handle multi-mode, multi-plex, multi-level networks.  It can identify key players, groups and vulnerabilities, model network changes over time, and perform COA
http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/03/17/police-intelligence-one-click-away/DzzDbrwdiNkjNMA1159ybM/story.html

Much, much more about ORA: http://www.casos.cs.cmu.edu/projects/ora/