Why Kenya needs to go hi-tech in fighting crime

Crime has been part of our society ever since the concept of laws was first approved.

 There has been an increased concern in the recent past due to escalating levels of crime both here in Kenya as well as internationally.

Huge amounts of data are recorded in the occurrence books(O/B) of many police stations within Kenya and specifically, at the county level.

This data can be Visualised and intelligently analysed so as to assist law enforcement agencies in understanding these crimes better and taking steps to remain ahead of the criminal elements.

Traditionally, police investigators would rely on the conventional policing methods that involved manual document surveys, review of criminal link networks and in-person interrogation of suspects so as to get to the bottom of crimes.

Traditional approaches focus more on the offender but also time and place have been proven to matter.

We have seen Information Technology bring about a revolution in the way we conduct our activities in most walks of life, including but not limited to business and governance.

Think of banking, where we have novel ideas such as mobile banking; transport, where taxi services are a finger click away; mobile application farming, where we are having Information technology as a game changer to the way farmers manage their farming business, to mention but a few.

CRIME ANALYSIS

With the advent of new technology more specifically in the computing world, we need to ask; Is there a way that we can do more in crime analysis so as to collaborate the use Information Technology as a means of understanding criminals, the crimes they commit, the locations of these crimes, their associations and how we can prevent these crimes in the future?

Locally, we have already done some primary implementations such as the use of street cameras and this can be made even better by adopting enhancements such as body cameras for police, in-vehicle computers and dash cams, facial recognition technologies, license plate readers or even mobile fingerprint readers.

Developed countries are leading the way in this frontier through use of Information Technology for crime analysis.The United States of America for instance has systems such as CompStat, PredPol and Compas, which are implemented across the various states to assist on intelligent computer assisted policing.

There, the developments are so drastic that they now have the introduction of GPS enabled bullets to track fleeing cars.

Advances in technology, which allow analysis of large quantities of data, are the foundations for the relatively new field known as crime analysis. More specifically, crime analysis is the breaking up of acts committed in violation of laws into their parts to find out their nature and reporting some analysis.

The role of the crime analysts varies from agency to agency. The objective of most crime analysis is to find meaningful information in vast amounts of data and disseminate this information to officers and investigators in the field to assist in their efforts to apprehend criminals and suppress criminal activity.

DATA MINING

The use of computers in law enforcement has changed and developed rapidly over the years. The use of information technology is more than just having officers use computers to automate manual office tasks. Instead, computers will be used for the advanced task of data mining.

Crime analysis broadly encompasses the following disciplines: data mining, statistics, psychology, Geospatial sciences among others.

Data Mining is the process of analyzing data from different perspective and summarising it into useful information. It allows users to analyse data from many different dimensions.

In addition, Data Mining or Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) in simple words is nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data.

It deals with the discovery of hidden knowledge, unexpected patterns and new rules from large databases. KDD is the process of identifying a valid, potentially, useful and ultimately understandable structure in data.

Data mining represents the emerging field that can be used a wide disciplinary of applications including marketing, banking, airlines and many other fields that highly affect the communities. Crime analysis is one of these important applications of data mining.

Our security forces now have databases populated with details of incidence reports, criminal descriptions, finger prints, and individual’s mobile phone records.

PRIVACY RIGHTS

The national crime research center provides valuable information that we can tap into for our crime analysis using data mining.

We can be able to discover interesting association rules that exist between the prevalent crimes that occur in the various counties in Kenya, the populations in these counties, gangs in these counties, education levels, and economic activities and how they contribute towards crime rates in these counties.

These associations can be further visualised to give a better understanding of the crimes and inform better policy planning for the future.

The downside of this new concept is complaints by citizens that their privacy rights are being endangered. All in all, the pros outweigh the cons in this new concept.

As a country, we have all it takes to achieve this possibility towards better security for our counties and country altogether. We can combine Computational intelligence with traditional methods for a more in-depth analysis of crime problems, offenders and the places that these crimes occur.

Increase in education standards requirements for police recruits, use of mobile terminals, more structured recording of demographics and better crime statistics reports are all setting the stage towards the achievement of Intelligent Computer Assisted Policing.