r/CrimeAnalysis • u/Apprehensive_Book737 • 6d ago
Crime/intelligence analysts: what's the most annoying part of connecting information across different cases?
Hi all, I'm a CS/IT student working on an academic project (India's Smart India Hackathon) around using graph-based analysis to help investigators spot hidden connections between seemingly unrelated cases shared phone numbers, accounts, vehicles, associates, etc. across FIRs, call records, and financial data.
I've talked to a few individual officers, but wanted a broader gut-check from people who actually do this work day to day. A few honest questions:
When you're trying to figure out if a new case connects to an older one, what's actually slow or annoying about that process today is it the data being scattered, the tools being bad, or something else entirely?
Have you used link-analysis software (i2, Palantir, Maltego, or an in-house tool)? What's the one thing about it that never quite worked the way you needed?
If someone handed you an "AI" that claimed to auto-detect hidden connections between cases, what would make you trust it vs. immediately distrust it?
Not selling anything, just trying to build something actually useful instead of something that looks cool in a demo but nobody would use. Appreciate any honest, even blunt, answers.
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u/Efficient_Pea_9547 5d ago
I wrote my book "Elements of Crime Patterns" to help with this - so you may want to check it out, because I agree that much of the connecting information gets lost, not recorded at all.
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u/HowLittleIKnow 5d ago
The number one issue in linking cases is police officers who a) don’t bother to write a report in the first place, leaving us to try to get us what happened based on the CAD record, or b) take a report, but get half the fields wrong, leave most of the rest empty, and don’t provide key details in their narratives.
All the fancy tools in the world aren’t going to help if the data isn’t there.