Hong-Eng Koh is Global Lead for the Justice and Public Safety, Oracle Corporation. He is leading a global team of experts in Justice & Public Safety, which focuses on various information systems such as police intelligence, prosecution, justice administration and public safety. Through research including listening to customers, analyzing the market and understanding the technology trends, they develop industry-focused technologies, solutions and even cloud offerings to better meet the customers? requirements, including future needs that they may not even be aware yet. Money Matters had a chat with Hong-Eng Koh on his recent visit to Pakistan on a new concept in policing he introduced.
What is ?Social-Enabled Policing??
Social-Enabled Policing is a concept introduced in 2013. It is a concept I feel policing and law enforcement agencies should adopt in this age of social networking and crowd-sourcing. Social-Enabled Policing supports the prevention, detection and solving of crime and disorder. It?s about community policing, intelligence-led policing and predictive policing. It?s made possible through social networking and ?crowd-sourcing?, and the effects brought about by them, complementing traditional policing. Mere engagement of the community through physical police presence is insufficient, we need a holistic social strategy and social presence to listen, analyze, understand, engage and communicate with the community. Social-Enabled Policing is not just about listening, analyzing and understanding the community. A point to note is that Social-Enabled Policing is not just about 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 report incident and be engaged through multiple channels including social sites, 24×7. Social-Enabled Policing is also about removal of barriers and stovepipes, facilitating a lifecycle 360-degree view of the victim, witness, suspect and incident.
What are the main trends in data analysis in support of Social-Enabled Policing?
Data analysis is not new and it has been used widely in intelligence-led policing and predictive policing. We understand the difference between success and failure in predictive policing lies in the relevant data model. Data model built based on knowledge from experienced police/intelligence officers. It?s clear that traditional data analysis based on past incidents, crime records, intelligence, Call Detail Records (CDR), video surveillance and ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) are not sufficient. It?s about fusion of many varieties of data: traditional, social and OSINT, and usually at high velocity with high volume. Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution can provide insights on anomalies and patterns discovery. Master Data Management can be used to connect seemingly different entities. The new Oracle Big Data SQL offers all these features. In summary, 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 crucial in support of Social-Enabled Policing, especially in the prevention, detection and mitigation of threats which may include crime, disorder, terrorism and even disaster.
What technologies are available to help decipher codes used by terrorists and organized crimes?
There is evidence that terrorist cells and organized crimes are communicating openly in the cyberspace but using codes. FBI even released a document on common acronyms, short forms and code words were used in social networking. Oracle supports semantic analysis through the Oracle Spatial and Graph Database, which is part of Oracle Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution.
Are there privacy or security concerns associated with Social-Enabled Policing?
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. It?s important to point out that a cornerstone of Social-Enabled Policing is its ability to analyze public sentiments through such OSINT. All the laws and policies point to the need for information security, such as the strong Security Inside Out offerings by Oracle, including infrastructure security, identity management, GRC (Government, Risk & Compliance), cloud security and mobile security.
A critical approach?By Haris Zamir, source: The News Magazine