The INTERPOL General Secretariat coordinates a variety of transnational organized crime-related projects through Working Groups where investigators exchange operational information on a regular basis. The INTERPOL Criminal Information System (ICIS) is an entity-driven database that stores data from a variety of countries, in different languages and formats. This situation poses a significant challenge to analysts as they often need to visualize large amounts of data in a comprehensive and efficient way.

The chart settings and merge entities features of Analyst Notebook and iBridge have allowed analysts to see and interpret information in a more efficient way, thus linking several suspects to different crime scenes and providing investigators with additional leads.

Situation
In the framework of Project PINK PANTHERS, a number of seemingly isolated armed jewelry robberies committed in a variety of dispersed geographical locations such as Japan, Spain, Dubai, Switzerland, Cyprus, and France have been reported to INTERPOL since 2002. Following a DNA match through INTERPOL databases, one suspect was linked to three different cases and a picture of the criminal network began to emerge. The offenders, all originating from the Former Yugoslavia, robbed high-value jewelry stores across the world, immediately leaving the target country after the incident.

The Rules of Processing Information (RPI), the legal framework that controls information sharing at INTERPOL, requires criminal information to be recorded in such a way that it is possible to know which specific information came from which country due to the fact that the owner country may not wish to share it with all members. For a particular offender recorded in the PINK PANTHERS Project, INTERPOL has received different information from eight member countries including a DNA profile, fingerprints, photos, aliases, and possible links to ten other cases. Nevertheless, the aliases or photos sent by country X may or may not be the same as those sent by country Y.

When the ICIS database is queried for this particular offender using iBridge and Analyst’s Notebook, the extraction result showed eight people with the same first and last name and DOB. All of which refer to the same person and each icon represents a “clone” of the entity created with the information received from each of the aforementioned eight member countries. There are more than 400 individuals linked to the PINK PANTHERS Project; the situation is the same for many other suspects.

When these “clones” are expanded (first degree expansion) to see all cases, aliases, and accomplices they are linked to, the result poses a significant challenge from an analytical perspective because as more information is received from different countries, the data expanded keeps growing. The analysts supporting investigators needs to see all the information linked to the suspect at once.

Solution
To tackle this problem, after expanding all the clones’ links, the analysts used the merge entities tool to collapse all clones into one in order to visualize all relevant data linked to the suspect at once and finally being able to deal more efficiently with the information and conduct analysis. The same process was applied for several other suspects.

The enhanced visualization of the vast data coming from different countries allowed the analyst to identify key links between suspects and associates; thereby linking several of the same suspects to different crime scenes.

Outcome
i2’s Analyst’s Notebook and iBridge have allowed INTERPOL to deal with large amounts of data in a more efficient way. The PINK PANTHER’s suspect-related information in the ICIS database remains unchanged (complying with the rules for the processing of information) but nonetheless, the visualization of the data for analytical purposes has improved significantly. Due to the large amount of nominal information sent to INTERPOL in the framework of this Project, drawing these charts by hand would be an impossible task.

Once in a position to identify how each individual is linked to each case in each country and who their aliases and accomplices are, analysts and investigators have a better understanding of the criminal network and the crime phenomenon, thereby being able to identify additional leads as well as information gaps.