early Pursuit against Organised crime using envirOnmental scanning, the Law and IntelligenCE systems

Organized crime is becoming more diverse in its activities and methods including “greater levels of collaboration between criminal groups, greater mobility in and around the EU, a diversification of illicit activity, and a growing dependence on a dynamic infrastructure, anchored in key locations and facilitated by widespread use of the Internet” (the Director of Europol, in his foreword to the OCTA 2011 report). An important means for law enforcement in combatting such crime is strategic early warning which is heavily depending on an efficient and effective environmental scanning.

For this, the ePOOLICE project will—in close collaboration with law enforcement partners, as well as criminological and legal experts—develop a prototype of an environmental scanning system implementing solutions applying the most promising technological advances and breakthroughs as provided by the RTD partners. The solutions will be tested an evaluated through running realistic use case scenarios that are developed by our user partners.

Central to the solution is development of an environmental knowledge repository of all relevant information and knowledge, including scanned information and derived, learned or hypothesized knowledge, as well as the metadata needed for credibility and confidence assessment, traceability, and privacy protection management. For effective and efficient utilization, as well as for interoperability, the repository will apply a standard representation form for all information and knowledge.

For effective and efficient scanning of the raw information sources, the project will develop an intelligent environmental radar that will utilize the knowledge repository for focusing the scanning. A key part of this process is semantic filtering for identification of data items that constitutes weak signals of emerging organized crime threats, exploiting fully the concept of crime hubs, crime indicators, and facilitating factors, as understood by our user partners.

crime threats, considering the validity and the seriousness of the detected threats, facilitating factors, and the availability and cost of countermeasures.