Making public safety more public friendly

Making public safety more public friendly

An interview with Hong-Eng Koh, Global Lead for Justice & Public Safety, Oracle Corporation.

What is ‘Social-Enabled Policing’?

Social-Enabled Policing is a concept, which policing and law enforcement agencies should adopt in this age of social networking and crowd-sourcing. Social-Enabled Policing supports prevention, detection and solving of crime and disorder. It’s about community policing, intelligence-led policing and predictive policing, and compliments traditional policing via social networking and ’crowd-sourcing‘. Engagement of the community through physical police presence is not sufficient enough. We need a cohesive social strategy and social presence to listen, analyse, understand, engage and communicate with the community. Social-Enabled Policing is not just about listening, analysing and understanding the community. Examples include giving crime prevention advice, alerting on disaster, seeking information and assistance, updating police actions, and giving assurance.  Our goal is to strengthen the relationship through social networking and increase the Return on Relationship (ROR)!

A point to note is that Social-Enabled Policing is not just constricted to adoption of social networking technologies and collecting open-source intelligence (OSINT); it’s still about traditional community policing, intelligence-led policing and predictive policing, complemented by social media and social networking. It facilitates community sentiment analysis and fusion of OSINT with traditional data sources for better analysis, preventing or allowing early detection of crime and disorder. It allows the social-savvy generation to instantly report incident and be engaged through multiple channels including social sites, 24×7.  Removal of barriers and stovepipes and facilitating a lifecycle 360-degree view of the victim, witness, suspect and incident is what Social Policing is all about.

From a technology perspective, what’s needed for the adoption of Social-Enabled Policing? What role does Oracle play here?

Oracle will singularly focus on the technology aspect of the Social-Enabled policing. This diagram showcases how Oracle fuels Social-Enabled Policing.Oracle’s connect with millions of social platforms via its one-stop shop service; i.e. Social Relationship Management cloud service – providing 700 million messages per day.

A simple search may yield irrelevant data. OSINT can be added to Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts and combined with traditional data sources for further analysis; or to initiate a crime investigation in the Oracle Integrated Policing Platform. We can engage with the social community across multiple social platforms via our end-to-end service provided by Oracle SRM.

Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts is a Big Data analytics solution. Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution, especially with Oracle SRM, supports prevention, detection and solving of crime and disorder.

Oracle Integrated Policing Platform is an end-to-end rules-driven and adaptive case management solution allowing 360-degree view of the victim, witness, suspect and incident. It supports engagement of the stakeholders through multiple channels including social sites through Oracle SRM. It breaks down barriers and stovepipes present in a police/law enforcement agency, allowing end-to-end management of people, objects, locations and events from incident reporting to prosecution preparation. Oracle Integrated Policing Platform can truly meet the highest demands by the social-savvy generation, and allow proactive engagement with them through traditional and social channels.

You mentioned about Big Data fusion and analytics through Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution. What are the main trends in data analysis in support of Social-Enabled Policing?

We understand that Data analysis has been used widely in intelligence-led policing (e.g. to identify a suspect) and predictive policing (e.g. to prevent a crime through proactive patrolling); as a result we can discern the difference between success and failure in predictive policing lies in the relevant data model.  Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution can provide insights on anomalies and patterns discovery, valuable and actionable intelligence to the police officers, be it to prevent a threat, detect a threat, or mitigate a threat. Master Data Management can be used to connect seemingly different entities. It compliments traditional business intelligence based predictive policing. Organizations need to evolve their data management architecture into a big data management system that enables the seamless integration all types of data from a variety of sources, including Hadoop, relational, and NoSQL.

To summate: fusion and analytics of Big Data through Oracle SRM and Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution, including Endeca Information Discovery and Oracle Big Data SQL-driven big data management system can be critical in support of Social-Enabled Policing, especially in the prevention, detection and mitigation of threats which may include crime, disorder, terrorism and even disaster.

Are there privacy or security concerns associated with Social-Enabled Policing?

I think it is very important to point out that a cornerstone of Social-Enabled Policing is its ability to analyze public sentiments through such OSINT. Police and the government have to protect the privacy of their constituents. For example, United Kingdom has a National ANPR Data Centre; law enforcement/intelligence agencies follow strict guidelines on the use of such data. In fact, Oracle’s security inside offerings, including infrastructure security, identity management, GRC (Government, Risk & Compliance), cloud security and mobile security – all laws and policies point to the need for information security

What are the future challenges in policing and technology?
It is a constant battle for Police and Law Enforcement agencies to be ahead of the curve in grappling with technology – especially how social networking. Big data, cloud, mobility and Internet of things works as compared to how criminals and terrorists adopt technologies – which is where Social-Enabled Policing can be used to counter such ongoing challenges.  Notwithstanding the fact that technology is just a tool to mitigate the world of Big Data, I believe that good old policing and detective skills are still essential.

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