Aiding an investigation

With some investigative help from business intelligence software, police in Sweden were able to identify a suspect in a series of shootings in the city of Malmo. Several people had been wounded and one person was killed in the shootings.

The Malmo police were longtime users of QlikView software from QlikTech but had never before used the software to analyze criminal activity. For the serial shooting case, police analysts loaded 10 years worth of crime reports (2 million reports comprising 2 billion rows of data) into an existing QlikView application. It took three hours to load the data and configure interactive reports, and then police analysts began investigating the data. The police also added in and cross-referenced information from the “tip line” submitted by vigilant citizens.

Police analyst Berth Simonsson says, “Speed is of the essence in any police work. With this groundbreaking technology, we can save lives, predict crime and target anti-social behavior ... QlikView has been a labor-saving tool for the police. Police analysts ask questions and it delivers answers instantly. Instead of going through the reports manually, we have been able to go through lots of information quickly to find the link that otherwise would have been hard to detect.”

According to a press release from QlikTech, police analysts would have had to read every crime report manually to search for clues that might lead them to a suspect. Simonsson estimated that it would have taken three people three months to read through just one year of reports.