NYPD Creates Pattern Recognition Software

The software, aka Patternizr, allows crime analysts stationed in each of the department’s 77 precincts to compare robberies, larcenies and thefts to hundreds of thousands of crimes logged in the NYPD’s database, transforming their hunt for crime patterns with the click of a button. Rebecca Shutt,(in photo) who works in the New York Police Department’s Office of Crime Control Strategies, speaks in New York. Shutt utilizes a software called Patternizr, which allows crime analysts to compare robbery, larceny and theft incidents to the millions of crimes logged in the NYPD’s database, aiding their hunt for crime patterns. (Photo: Mark Lennihan, AP)

Claimed to be much faster than the old method, which involved analysts sifting through reports, racking their brains for key details about various crimes and deciding whether they fit into a pattern. It’s more comprehensive, too, with analysts able to spot patterns across the city instead of just in their precinct.

The department disclosed its use of the technology only this month, with Levine and Chohlas-Wood detailing their work in the INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics in an article alerting other departments how they could create similar software. Speaking about it with the news media for the first time, they told The Associated Press recently that theirs is the first police department in the country to use a pattern-recognition tool like this.

“The goal of Patternizr, is to improve public safety,” said Levine, an astrophysicist by academic training. “The more easily that we can identify patterns in those crimes, the more quickly we can identify and apprehend perpetrators.”

Levine and Chohlas-Wood were inspired by the work of a New York University team that studied a similar approach to pattern recognition but never produced a workable version.

The two trained the program on 10 years of patterns that the department had manually identified. In testing, it accurately re-created old crime patterns one-third of the time and returned parts of patterns 80 percent of the time. The NYPD says the cost was minimal because the two developers were already on staff.

Drones A Headache For Boarder Patrol Agents

Boarder officials face another challenge — how to stop smugglers using them to fly drugs over national borders.

Late one evening earlier this month, a Border Patrol agent spotted a drone flying over the U.S./Mexico border, heading toward San Ysidro in southern California, the LA Times reported.

A photo of the drone alleged to have been used in the crime appears to show a DJI Matrice 600, a powerful hexacopter costing around $4,500.

 

Police Department Upstate New York Has Drones

Western New York police department has purchased a drone for $9,994.99.

It will be flying the skies of West Seneca to help officers solve crimes and keep the community safe. The grant was secured by State Senator Patrick Gallivan.

West Seneca Police have been training for eight months on how to use this new technology, which officers say will assist in many different police missions including search and rescues, creek levels during flooding and crime scene analysis.

The drone is equipped to drop items to those in need, such as a during a hostage situation. They can put a cell phone in it for delivery to someone in need, during a hostage situation which will help our hostage negotiators maintain communication with them.The drone can travel up to 400 feet high, with a speed up to 50 miles per hour, with a rotating camera that captures video from all angles.

The drone also can give the investigators an indicator of where a fire started,” according to Lt. McNamara. “Accident investigation, that can be used to show the weather conditions at the time of an accident.”

The department is ready to start flying, but is waiting for final approval from the Federal Aviation Administration to use the drone at night.

Microsoft’s New Cybercrime Center

Microsoft is bringing together security engineers, digital forensics experts and lawyers trained in fighting software pirates under one roof at its new Cybercrime Center. Microsoft Corp’s expanded Digital Crimes Unit a high-security facility combines a vast array of tactics that have worked the best: massive data gathering and analysis, investigative detective work, high-level diplomacy and creative lawyering.

This new approach,  launched on Thursday, is the latest attempt to close the gap created in the past decade as criminal hackers innovated in technology and business methods to stay ahead of adversaries mired in the slow-moving world of international law enforcement. 

Many of the biggest victories against organized online criminals have come when private companies have worked together to seize control of the networks of hacked computers, called botnets, that carry out criminal operations. Though it is at times derided for the security shortfalls in its own products, Microsoft has led more of those seizures than any other company. The center contains a lab for dissecting malicious software samples that is accessible only with fingerprint authorization. In another room, a monitor tracks the countries and Internet service providers with the greatest number of machines belonging to some of the worst botnets.

The Piracy Squad 

About 80 of the crime unit’s 100 staffers have focused on the piracy of Microsoft products, with far fewer devoted to deconstructing the methods of criminals attacking Microsoft users and stopping them when possible.

 The piracy squad has found over and over, counterfeiters who were using botnets that also sent spam or attacked websites with denial-of-service attacks, or who slipped malicious software into copied Microsoft wares, or who had other ties to broader security issues.