Case Study

Scenario. Real-Time Crime Centre (15 marks)

A Real-Time Crime Centre (RTCC) was originally considered a hub of data analysis that identified emerging crime trends. However, as technology has advanced, RTCC have developed into far more effective tools in the fight against crime and can now assist in all nature of police work. Since 2012 there has been more investment in RTCCs - not only by large city police departments, but also by county and town police departments. Furthermore, in addition to providing analytical support for investigators in the field, RTCCs have become more technically advanced and now assist in all nature of police work.

An example of a smaller RTCC at work is the RTCC serving West Palm Beach Police Department. The Centre not only has access to millions of regional and national crime records for analysis purposes, but counts among its arsenal of crime fighting tools:

* A gunfire detection system,

* Video-surveillance cameras, and

* License-plate recognition technology.

Therefore, rather than operating as a New York-style RTCC, the Centre at West Palm Beach is more like an Incident Command Centre covering everything from multi-agency coordination following a high-casualty event to issuing Amber Alerts when children are missing. Due to the way the technologies integrate with each other, police can even respond to a shooting before a call to 9-1-1 is received.

This scenario shows how real time analytics can help public safety and fight crimes.

Q1. RTCC relies on the data access to internal and external sources, e.g., crime record unit for crime history information and vehicle registration administration for car license information. Data from such sources often consists of both structured data and unstructured data (like photos, videos, reports in PDF format, etc.), and may be hosted in different data systems, e.g., Hadoop, ERP systems, file systems. In addition, some external confidential data are not allowed to be replicated. Explain how we should integrate such data and conduct data analytics at RTCC and seek best analytics performance when decide the supporting data analytical platform. Please justify your answer. (6 marks) Q2.. RTCC often needs to analyse a lot of live videos generated by a large network of surveillance cameras. Such continuous video streams are of large volume, and require super large computing power to analyse them at real time. What technologies related to data analytics and introduced in our course would you recommend to a RTCC to use to handle the (near) real time analysis of live video streams? Please justify your answer. (6 marks)