A standardized approach to recording data about criminal activity has the potential to bolster attempts to disrupt networks, researchers report.
LONDON — Police officers on the beat act as the eyes and ears of law enforcement operations. Their reports will be vital in securing successful convictions.
But if every police force records its intelligence differently, that has the potential to hinder national and even international attempts to work together to break up criminal networks.
As a new paper written by Northeastern University researchers puts it, putting “garbage in” when it comes to data collection means getting “garbage out” when it comes to putting offenders behind bars.
Justin Wang Ngai Yeung, a Ph.D. student with the Network Science Institute at Northeastern in London, collaborated with associate professor Riccardo di Clemente to look at the impact that “missing data” can have on derailing the activities of criminal gangs.
They analyzed publicly available datasets relating to intelligence about a London juvenile gang; the ‘Ndrangheta organized crime group in Calabria, Italy; a cocaine trafficking ring in New York; and the al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist network responsible for the Madrid train bombing in 2004.
After investigating the relationship between data quality and law enforcement intervention action, Yeung and Di Clemente — along with their co-author, Renaud Lambiotte, from the University of Oxford — found that police and agency actions were rendered “largely ineffective” in cases where there was incomplete data.
Their paper, “Garbage in, garbage out: impacts of data quality on criminal network intervention,” concludes that “data incompleteness is a significant threat to both the intelligence and implementation phases of network disruption missions” conducted by law enforcement agencies.
“The biggest conclusion,” Yeung says, “is that missing data is still the biggest problem in effective criminal network interventions.”
He argues that there is a need for a more standardized approach to collecting and recording information gathered about how criminal networks operate.
That would be the more ethical approach to dealing with the problem, he says, as any push for more data comes with the prospect of introducing additional surveillance and treating a wider section with suspicion.
“Instead of having more and more data, we should think about how we can aggregate different sources of data,” he explains.
“We have different agencies using different channels to collect information,” Yeung says. “For example, we have street cops going out and observing people and collecting different types of data. There will be text data, image data. You might also have audio data when there are phone taps.
“This different data provides a lot of information about how the network actually operates and also about who is involved in these networks. We know this data is available, but the problem is that it is so unstandardized that we cannot really merge them.
“And that is why we’re suggesting, instead of imagining a world with perfect data, maybe we can work with the data that we already have — to have a standardized approach and standardized procedure with how we collect the data and how we put this data in the system.”
There are examples internationally where this is happening, says Yeung, who points to the way the European Union has encouraged national agencies to sync with Europol, the bloc’s agency for law enforcement cooperation, in order to create an “interoperable” data-sharing system.
The EU’s 2023 Prum II framework aims to “improve, facilitate and accelerate data exchange” by enabling more open sharing of biometric and criminal records across member states, the paper notes.
But the issue with such initiatives in the past has been that they are set at a “really high level,” Yeung continues. “It always boils down to the local agencies and whether they want to do it or not — and this is always the bottleneck.”
Di Clemente says the need for better collaboration in order to solve the issue of “missing” intelligence data comes in the face of evolving and improving tactics by criminal gangs that allow them to ensure their activities are difficult to detect.
Both emerging and older technologies — from encryption software to the use of easily disposed burner phones — are used by criminals to keep their activities under the radar, making it “more difficult to tackle these networks.”
Di Clemente argues that this highlights the urgent need for a universal system for data collection.
“The fact is that even if we become very good at understanding all the information that is present in a crime network, they are evolving too,” he says. “They are improving cryptography, they are improving all of these types of different tools to be able to hide from officers.
“So we really need a common framework that is able to tackle this missing information. To provide better results, you have to standardize it for everybody.”