State Law Enforcement Agency

The Challenge

A key U.S. state law enforcement agency (LEA) wanted to increase both investigative capacity and capability, by being able to quickly identify and analyze the connections between disparate data sets.

With their previous approach, there was significant overhead associated with locating and pulling data from different systems and spreadsheets, and then trying to organize, connect, and analyze that data. A better approach held the promise of being able to increase efficiency, uncover new insights, and ultimately help reduce violent crime.

The Requirements

The LEA concluded that what was needed was a data platform and intelligence analysis system that could be used to connect and analyze a variety of disparate data sets. Key requirements included:

• Provide a central data repository which could easily connect data from many sources, such as NIBIN data, firearms data, call data records (CDR), police reports, and many others.
• Flexible platform that could be used in many different scenarios, including reactive investigations starting with a specific person or location, as well as proactive investigations looking for patterns and connections across all the data
• Robust link analysis capability
• Easy to use software, with no requirements for coding in order to do data cleaning, analysis, or anything else.

The Evaluation

Team members of the LEA had prior experience with Palantir and IBM products, and considered these and other solutions. Palantir offered an attractive product but was price-prohibitive, while the IBM solution lacked the desired flexibility. The LEA selected DataWalk as it provided the compelling combination of extreme flexibility, ability to easily identify/analyze connections across disparate data sets, enterprise functionality, and an affordable price.

The Solution

With DataWalk, the LEA is importing data from various sources, including:

• ATF data
• Case management data
• Field interviews
• NIBIN data
• Arrest records
• Call Data Records (CDRs)
• Parolee information
• Jail data
• Vehicle data
• Cellebrite data from cellphone extracts

Data is normalized in DataWalk using DataWalk Apps such as the Address Parser and PDF Parser. CDR data is automatically normalized to a consistent format, regardless of the telecom service provider. Data is connected in DataWalk in the Universe Viewer, a highly flexible knowledge graph where data is re-organized around relevant business objects such as people, phones, locations and so forth. This data can then be easily searched and visually queried via an intuitive visual interface.