COPLINK Artificial Intelligence Helps Solve Crimes

May/June 03
by Bill Siuru

The potential uses of COPLINK® are virtually unlimited, including proactive applications like finding planned terrorist incidents.

A series of armed robberies were committed at several fried chicken franchises in Tucson, AZ. The suspects were identified as two African-American males who wore masks, except during the last robbery. During that robbery, a female witness recognized one of them to be a person known to her as "Peanut" and said "he lived on North Estrella Street." That's all the Tucson Police Department needed to apprehend the suspect. That's because they plugged these few clues into a computer program called COPLINK®.

COPLINK® is based on technology originally developed by Hsinchun Chen, Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the University of Arizona. The project, begun in 1997, was not originally aimed at law enforcement applications, but the direction was reoriented when a Tucson Police sergeant saw its potential for police investigations. COPLINK® was further developed for commercial sales and is now marketed by Knowledge Computing Corporation.

Partially financed by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Justice, the developers worked with law enforcement agencies such as the Tucson Police Department.

How Does It Work?

Basically, COPLINK® searches through the separate databases of different agencies and identifies connections among suspects, vehicles, crimes, locations and other data to provide investigative leads they cannot obtain anywhere else. COPLINK® differs from standard database search software in that it uses artificial intelligence, or AI. Its neural network continually updates information from many databases to "learn" patterns of association so it can perform searches with ever increasing intelligence. Knowledge-based databases (like COPLINK®’s) are generated directly from multiple data sources to provide large-scale intelligence analysis capabilities, including the identification of previously unknown relationships. The bottom line is that COPLINK® can take millions of pieces of seemingly random, and often inconsequential, pieces of information and find connections between things like a license plate, weapon, nickname, speeding tickets or tattoos.

Three Programs

The COPLINK® Solution Suite consists of three integrated software modules. COPLINK ConnectTM is a software program which allows easy information sharing within, and among, various jurisdictions and government entities stored on widely differing systems and computer platforms. Users query and view information gathered from different sources using a single easy to use interface. COPLINK DetectTM builds on COPLINK ConnectTM so users can perform sophisticated analysis on the shared data to discover hidden relationships and co-occurrences which are beyond the capabilities of the human mind. Unlike traditional crime analysis programs which pinpoint when and where crimes occurred, COPLINK DetectTM frequently shows WHO is committing the crimes. COPLINK AdministrationTM manages the tools necessary to perform routine security and maintenance on the COPLINK® system.

User-Friendly

Data is organized and displayed rapidly in a user-friendly, logical, and flexible Web-based format and is based on popular Internet Web browsers so it can be mastered by even inexperienced computer users in less than a day. Queries can be made based on several categories with maximum versatility on each quick loading search page. Query results are displayed in easy to sort summary tables showing key information in column format designed to find specific information fast. Summary tables contain hypertext links for each matched entry to underlying detail data and source documents.

Success Stories

COPLINK® is already in use in more than a dozen jurisdictions around the country and has helped in many criminal investigations. For example, one case involved a victim who was found shot with his throat slashed and run over by the suspect's vehicle. The victim provided very little information - a man named "Shorty" who had "Caeser" tattooed on his arm. With only these clues, a Tucson detective (using COPLINK®) found the potential suspect and printed out a mug shot. Shorty was arrested within five hours. In another example, a federal agency sought a man wanted for a firearms related incident. The only clue was that the criminal's sister lived in Tucson, Arizona, and had an abusive boyfriend. Using COPLINK®, officials searched hundreds of case files until they found a woman involved in a domestic violence case who was also linked to a man of similar age with the same last name. This took 25 minutes. The program has also helped build the case against John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, the two Washington area snipers.

September 11 showed how small warnings buried deep in various agencies’ files could be deciphered and pieced together. Therefore, the Department of Homeland Security is looking very carefully at the technology. Depending on the capabilities included and the agency size, COPLINK® can cost anywhere from $40,000 to over $200,000.

As to security, COPLINK® was designed to maintain a secure environment -no matter the source of the data - by protecting data transactions within a secure law enforcement communications network using data compression and 128 bit encryption. The system operates in a dedicated private network, a Virtual Private Network (VPN), or an Intranet. Individual agencies have control over the data which is integrated and updated.

Available Demo

The COPLINK® system is available only to authorized law enforcement personnel, but several demonstrations are available at www.coplinkconnect.com. Users have to request a user name and password from Knowledge Computing Corporation prior to gaining access to the system. Because of the sensitive nature of the COPLINK® data, the demo version uses data which is fictitious. A sophisticated algorithm scrambles the names, addresses and other information, yet preserves the associations between the database objects. In this way, the demo system can provide a realistic example of the capabilities of COPLINK®.