The Western Australia Police Force has been recognised both in Australia and globally for their adoption of advanced technology solutions. Their graph platform IRIS, powered by GraphAware Hume, is no exception, delivering a cutting-edge technology solution that helps the agency in its mission to keep the Western Australian community safe.
Challenge: Siloed data
The mountains of valuable data were disconnected and siloed.
Policing organisations are uniquely challenged by data silos, due to the number of disparate
sources required for complex crime analysis.
In response to the rising complexity of solving crime, the Western Australia Police Force successfully implemented a number of state-of-the-art data technologies. These initiatives collected and stored significant amounts of valuable data in specialised systems and databases.
These data sources offered valuable insights to intelligence analysts, investigators, and frontline officers in their day-to-day work.
However, the all-too-common challenge of working within a modern policing environment remained: the mountains of data from these systems were disconnected and siloed.
In practical terms, this meant that users had to search through dozens of systems and conduct disconnected crime analysis.
Traditional analysis techniques and tools fell short, as they required analysts to manually uncover key linkages between entities. The WA Police Force had all of the data, but didn’t have a single platform that unified their data, enabled deep link analysis, and rapidly uncovered hidden connections and associations of interest.
Solution: Single view of intelligence
Quickly and easily get a complete picture of an entity of interest across all data sources.
The Western Australia Police Force deployed IRIS, a graph database platform powered by
GraphAware Hume and Neo4j.
Within four months, the project teams were able to ingest data from data silos scattered throughout the organisation and create a consolidated single view of intelligence.
Using Hume Orchestra, entities and relationships from source systems were loaded into Neo4j, then connected using entity resolution pipelines. The single view of intelligence that was created allowed users to quickly and easily get a complete picture of an entity of interest across all ingested data sources.
Using Hume Actions, users could rapidly find answers to their key questions of interest instead of having to query data in multiple systems manually.
Having launched IRIS to production within four months, the next challenge was to onboard and train thousands of users across the organisation.
GraphAware and the WA Police Force worked together to train tactical intelligence analysts, investigators and front line officers. They learned how to use IRIS through the use of manuals and guides and participation in on-line courses and in-person scenario based training.
Results: Accelerated analysis
Data queries that once took hours now happen in an instant.
The IRIS platform, powered by GraphAware Hume, is now in the hands of numerous users, with hundreds accessing the platform each month.
Data queries that once took hours now happen in an instant, empowering law enforcement to act swiftly and dynamically react to changes in real time.
But the true impact extends beyond numbers and statistics. GraphAware Hume has enabled the Western Australia Police Force to beer serve the community and respond to the ever-increasing challenges of crime.
The previously time-consuming manual process for investigating high volume crime, has been significantly sped up thanks to investigators ability to search and analyse the connected data within IRIS.
Such high-speed information-gathering and analysis has enhanced the force’s ability to respond to high volume crime.
The journey with IRIS is only just beginning. We will see IRIS further developed in the form of new data sources and additional capability such as automated alerts for patterns of interest and much more.
These capabilities will empower users to prevent, disrupt, and solve crimes faster and with more insight into data than ever before.— Janelle Baily, Head of Data Science and Analytics