Assist Law Enforcement Research Articles

Implementation of Mutual Legal Assistance in Law Enforcement of the Crime of Piracy by the Indonesian Navy (Study. MT. Orkim Harmony)

The crime of piracy is transnational; handling it requires bilateral or multilateral cooperation; according to Article 9 (2) of the Republic of Indonesia Law, Number 1 of 2006, only the National Police Chief and the Attorney General can request Mutual Legal Assistance. Still, the Indonesian Navy has applied for Mutual Legal Assistance against the MT Orkim Harmony piracy case. With these facts, this paper tries to see how the efforts of the Central Authority (Polri and Prosecutors) in assisting law enforcement by the Navy and how the implementation of the Mutual Legal Assistance agreement. The research method uses normative law or library research with a statute approach and analyzes the data in this study using qualitative normative analysis. From the results of the study

Web scraping of ecstasy user reports as a novel tool for detecting drug market trends

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) is a technique involving the use of publicly available information for the purpose of addressing a specific intelligence issue. Open-source, user-reported data on ecstasy pills was extracted from a clear-web site known as Pill Reports (available at www.pillreports.net) and analysed to establish whether drug intelligence could be derived to assist law enforcement and policymakers in taking effective action against the illicit ecstasy market. A comprehensive database of 4358 ecstasy pills reported by users in Australia and New Zealand between September 2005 and April 2020 was established. Using this database, intelligence was gathered under two categories: general summary data and geographic movement trends. General summary data included pill characteristics (i.e., logo, colour and shape variations), regional distribution and temporal usage trends. Geographic movement data was used to ascertain whether a common sequence of flow (i.e., trafficking patterns) could be identified both (i) across state lines and (ii) east to west across Australia. Open-source investigation of online ecstasy report data proved to be most effective for obtaining general summary data which was concordant with other more costly and onerous population-wide approaches like wastewater analyses and population surveys. There was some evidence to suggest where MDMA is entering Australian borders, and an east-to-west onshore distribution pathway is suggested, taking approximately one year to run its course. This OSINT technique illustrates a novel strategic approach that can be used to monitor drug trends in real-time.

Modeling illegal logging in Brazil

Deforestation is a major threat to global environmental wellness, with illegal logging as one of the major causes. Recently, there has been increased effort to model environmental crime, with the goal of assisting law enforcement agencies in deterring these activities. We present a continuous model for illegal logging applicable to arbitrary domains. We model the practice of criminals under influence of law enforcement agencies using tools from multiobjective optimal control theory and consider non-instantaneous logging events and load-dependent travel velocity. We calibrate our model using real deforestation data from the Brazilian rainforest and demonstrate the importance of geographically targeted patrol strategies.

Examining Online Indicators of Extremism in Violent Right-Wing Extremist Forums

Although many law enforcement and intelligence agencies are concerned about online communities known to facilitate violent right-wing extremism, little is empirically known about the presence of extremist ideologies, expressed grievances, or violent mobilization efforts that make up these spaces. In this study, we conducted a content analysis of a sample of postings from two of the most conspicuous right-wing extremist forums known for facilitating violent extremism, Iron March and Fascist Forge. We identified a number of noteworthy posting patterns within and across forums that may assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in identifying credible threats online.

Cracking Sex Trafficking: Data Analysis, Pattern Recognition, and Path Prediction

Human trafficking, the exploitation of humans for monetary gain or benefit, is a widespread humanitarian issue that is typically sub‐classified into labor and sex trafficking. In the last decade, sex traffickers have used online classified advertisements to advertise sexual services. Although these advertisements are visible to the general public and law enforcement, the volume of ads, the frequency with which their posting locale changes, and the use of obfuscation tactics make it difficult for law enforcement agencies to react. Existing products for law enforcement focus on identifying, tracking, and correlating individual activity by performing deep searches for specific information against a database of historical posts. While this deep search capability is useful for investigating specific cases, it overlooks higher‐level patterns that exist in ads. Using a website that has been linked to several sex trafficking‐related arrests, we demonstrate a framework for harvesting, linking, and detecting these patterns in a dataset comprised of more than 10 million advertisements targeting US cities. Our framework combines information systems and operations research concepts to identify groups of posts based on text, phone numbers, and pictures; determine circuits associated with post groups, and predict future movements using four different methods. Our description of the framework and comparison of the grouping and prediction methods provide insights that can assist law enforcement agencies to combat individuals/organizations involved in illicit sexual activities, including sex trafficking, proactively. Also, this demonstration provides researchers interested in developing advanced interdiction models targeting illicit sexual activities with a clear picture regarding available data formats.

SOME PROBLEMS OF USING THE FACIAL RECOGNITION SYSTEM IN LAW ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITIES

The article draws attention to the problems of the use of modern software and hardware tools and methods of facial fixing and recognizing by law enforcement agencies. In using various techniques aimed at obtaining information on a person’s physiological and biological characteristics, it is important to respect not only his or her right to protect the data, but also state interests in combating crime (terrorism, corruption). Important factors are state regulation and the development of norms for the effective use of information technologies, telecommunications and artificial intelligence technologies so that citizens do not doubt their effectiveness and legitimacy. Purpose: to analyze current problems of combating crime; to submit proposals for improving the application of the facial recognition system, and the establishment by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of a single biometric database of Russians with the strictest compliance with citizens' constitutional rights to privacy, reliable protection of their personal data. Methods: the authors use empirical methods of comparison, description, interpretation as well as theoretical methods of formal and dialectical logic. Results: the study reveals the problems of using the facial recognition system, the advantages and disadvantages of the system are analyzed. On the one hand, in the Russian Federation there are no clear instructions and an algorithm for the use of face-recognition cameras, which would satisfy society’s requirements to protect private life and personal and family privacy. On the other hand, face-recognition cameras can assist law enforcement authorities in locating wanted persons and detecting (solving) crimes.

НЕКОТОРЫЕ ЭЛЕМЕНТЫ КРИМИНАЛИСТИЧЕСКОЙ ХАРАКТЕРИСТИКИ ВЗЯТОЧНИЧЕСТВА

Розглянуто криміналістичний аспект корупційного злочину на прикладі хабарницт4 способів учинення хабарництва. Зроблено висновок, що характер механізму в кожному конкретному випадку безпосередньо пов'язаний зі способом учинення злочинів і особистістю учасників, а їхня заінтересованість в приховуванні факту незаконних дій і високе посадове становище завжди є чинником відсутності слідової інформації.

The role of forensic science and forensic examination in international cooperation in the investigation of crimes

The application of forensic science and expertise is a necessary prerequisite for the investigation of crimes at the local and national level. Without the use of forensic science and expertise, an investigation within the framework of a criminal process becomes dead and unsubstantiated. But with the globalisation of world processes, the development of technologies, the speed of information transmission, the formation of crime outside the borders of one state and its entry into the international level has become an urgent problem, which has become a challenge in countering such crime and the need to steer forensic science and expertise towards assisting law enforcement activities. A special feature of countering the investigation of crimes was the creation of international cooperation between forensic specialists and expert witnesses even prior to the establishment of practical institutions that could counteract them in practice. Therewith, some representatives of such international unions and associations have taken serious steps in creating mechanisms for real counteraction to crimes at the international level (R.A. Reiss, G. Soderman, M.Sh. Bassiuni). Coverage of the problem of international cooperation in the investigation of crimes through the definition of the role of forensic science and expertise allowed focusing on the following blocks: 1) international associations of forensic specialists for combating crime in the historical context; 2) international criminal police organisations in combating crime; 3) international cooperation in the field of conducting forensic examinations; 4) the use of forensic and special knowledge in the activities of the International Criminal Court. Thus, a combination of theory and practice in the fight against crime is demonstrated. Historically, this is associated with the role of forensic science and expertise in recording traces of crimes, analysing them, and forming legal, forensic, and expert witness opinions. The purpose of the study is to establish the decisive role of forensic science and expertise in international cooperation in the investigation of crimes. For this, the authors turned to forensic science and expertise, historical processes that served to create substantial international organisations created to counter international crime

A detailed review of forensic facial reconstruction techniques.

Facial reconstruction is an effective forensic technique that can help recreate a victim's facial appearance from the skull. It is typically used to assist law enforcement agencies to identify missing deceased persons. Reconstruction techniques are usually based on the relationship between the underlying hard tissues, such as bone structure, and soft tissues such as the facial muscles and facial features. Facial reconstruction can be a feasible alternative to identify the remains from a decomposed, mutilated, or skeletonised corpse. It is important to remember that although the outcomes are empirical in nature, the technique has been applied widely in many situations. Recent advancements in technology and computer-based techniques have increased the accuracy and validity of this forensic discipline. We consider the most commonly used facial reconstruction techniques in this paper, with a detailed description of manual 3D techniques.

From Identification to Intelligence: An Assessment of the Suitability of Forensic DNA Phenotyping Service Providers for Use in Australian Law Enforcement Casework.

Forensic DNA Phenotyping (FDP) is an established but evolving field of DNA testing. It provides intelligence regarding the appearance (externally visible characteristics), biogeographical ancestry and age of an unknown donor and, although not necessarily a requirement for its casework application, has been previously used as a method of last resort in New South Wales (NSW) Police Force investigations. FDP can further assist law enforcement agencies by re-prioritising an existing pool of suspects or generating a new pool of suspects. In recent years, this capability has become ubiquitous with a wide range of service providers offering their expertise to law enforcement and the public. With the increase in the number of providers offering FDP and its potential to direct and target law enforcement resources, a thorough assessment of the applicability of these services was undertaken. Six service providers of FDP were assessed for suitability for NSW Police Force casework based on prediction accuracy, clarity of reporting, limitations of testing, cost and turnaround times. From these assessment criteria, a service provider for the prediction of biogeographical ancestry, hair and eye colour was deemed suitable for use in NSW Police Force casework. Importantly, the study highlighted the need for standardisation of terminology and reporting in this evolving field, and the requirement for interpretation by biologists with specialist expertise to translate the scientific data to intelligence for police investigators.

Light microscopic iris classification using ensemble multi-class support vector machine.

Similar to other biometric systems such as fingerprint, face, DNA, iris classification could assist law enforcement agencies in identifying humans. Iris classification technology helps law-enforcement agencies to recognize humans by matching their iris with iris data sets. However, iris classification is challenging in the real environment due to its invertible and complex texture variations in the human iris. Accordingly, this article presents an improved Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF with Bag-of-Words model to extract distinct and robust features from the iris image, followed by ensemble multi-class-SVM to classify iris. The proposed methodology consists of four main steps; first, iris image normalization and enhancement; second, localizing iris region; third, iris feature extraction; finally, iris classification using ensemble multi-class support vector machine. For preprocessing of input images, histogram equalization, Gaussian mask and median filters are applied. The proposed technique is tested on two benchmark databases, that is, CASIA-v1 and iris image database, and achieved higher accuracy than other existing techniques reported in state of the art.

Tor’s underworld, ‘onion services’ and child sex abuse material: Submission to the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement inquiry into ‘Law enforcement capabilities in relation to child exploitation’

The Australian Commonwealth Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 20202, which passed both houses of parliament on August 25, 2021, will assist law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in investigating serious crime including online child sex abuse materials (CSAM). Despite relevant tools such as data disruption, network activity and account takeover warrants, LEAs will nevertheless encounter challenges in the darkweb – notably Tor (formerly known as The Onion Router), the largest of the anonymous platforms. Anonymous Internet services, such as Tor, are designed to evade surveillance and its highly decentralised structure is resilient despite the periodic success of cross-jurisdictional policing operations in disrupting, arresting, and closing both illicit contraband markets and CSAM sites on Tor (Broadhurst, et al., 2021). The deterrent effect of LEA operations tends to be short lived, but can influence the perceptions of risk and deter potential offenders. LEA operations also can stimulate self-regulation (e.g., banning and/or censoring particular products or interests) among some relevant Tor hidden or ‘onion’ service providers. Anonymity also provides opportunities to reach out to existing support ‘communities’ among these online secretive sub-cultures and seek support in crafting relevant online health, education and treatment referral services.This submission considers the capability of Australia’s law enforcement agencies to tackle the growing scourge of child exploitation. In particular, concern about the existence of dedicated CSAM onion services hosted on the Tor network were raised (Terms of Reference [a]). This also required an understanding of the tools used by offenders to access CSAM and the ability of law enforcement to detect CSAM and identify offenders (Terms of Reference [d]). We suggest specific support be provided to develop and evaluate online treatment programs for CSAM offenders using the anonymous format provided by Tor . Finally, we propose a study examining the links between offline and online/contact and non-contact offenders in the context of anonymity (Terms of Reference [f]).

Uncovering Cybercrimes in Social Media through Natural Language Processing

Among the myriad of applications of natural language processing (NLP), assisting law enforcement agencies (LEA) in detecting and preventing cybercrimes is one of the most recent and promising ones. The promotion of violence or hate by digital means is considered a cybercrime as it leverages the cyberspace to support illegal activities in the real world. The paper at hand proposes a solution that uses neural network (NN) based NLP to monitor suspicious activities in social networks allowing us to identify and prevent related cybercrimes. An LEA can find similar posts grouped in clusters, then determine their level of polarity, and identify a subset of user accounts that promote violent activities to be reviewed extensively as part of an effort to prevent crimes and specifically hostile social manipulation (HSM). Different experiments were also conducted to prove the feasibility of the proposal.

Legal protection of religious sentiments of believers: features of conducting religious expertise

The article deals with the actual aspects of interaction between lawyers and religious scholars in conducting religious expertise on the issues of insulting the religious feelings of religious citizens. An attempt is made to define the concept of “religious feelings”, their composition. The significance of the work of an expert religious scholar in assisting law enforcement agencies is shown.

A Forensic Investigation of Terrorism in Nigeria: An Apriori Algorithm Approach

Investigations towards studying terrorist activities have recently attracted a great amount of research interest. In this paper, we investigate the use of the Apriori algorithm on the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) for forensic investigation purposes. Recently, the Apriori algorithm, which could be considered a forensic tool, has been used to study terrorist activities and patterns across the world. As such, our motivation is to utilise the Apriori algorithm approach on the GTD to study terrorist activities and the areas/states in Nigeria with high frequencies of terrorist activities. We observe that the most preferred method of terrorist attacks in Nigeria is through armed assault. Again, our experiment shows that attacks in Nigeria are mostly successful. Also, we observe from our investigations that most terrorists in Nigeria are not suicidal. The main application of this work can be used by forensic experts to assist law enforcement agencies in decision making when handling terrorist attacks in Nigeria.

The Position of Convict as Justice Collaborator in Revealing Organized Crime

This article aims to examine the position of the convict as justice collaborator in revealing organized crime. A justice collaborator can assist law enforcement officers. The background of the study is the concept of crown witness, which is often used in proving criminal cases, even though it violates human rights. A difficulty in revealing organized crime is that perpetrators mostly do not disclose their criminal network and the parties involved. Information from the convict related to the network of the crime they committed makes law enforcement officers easier to reveal the organized crime. This study used a juridical analysis with an approach to laws and regulations, conceptual method, and comparative method. The results of the study show that convict who chose to become a justice collaborator has a vital role. Law enforcement officers can take advantage of this role in exposing organized crimes without human rights violations to the convict. The convict can have a reward in the form of parole and additional remissions.

Dark Web Traffic Analysis of Cybersecurity Threats Through South African Internet Protocol Address Space

Cybersecurity crimes masterminded at dark web pose social security threats global and open a conundrum for researchers in the field of security informatics. Dark web describes a layer beneath deep web on Internet protocol stack that is designed to be concealed from orthodox search engines. The concealment of orthodox search engines has made it extremely hard for law enforcement agencies to track specific websites that pose great cybersecurity threats. This research was supported financially by the BankSeta, Council on Scientific and Industrial Research and National Research Foundation of South Africa to track the malicious use of dark web through South African Internet protocol address space. The study applies the method of dark web crawling using onion router to track traffic with high tendency for cybersecurity threats. The results of crawling experimental indicate that child pornography, sales of spyware, hacking, sales of drugs, planning of violence and sales of dangerous weapons are the frequent malicious use of dark web in South Africa. The outcome of this study can help in creating an accurate revelation of cybersecurity threats to assist law enforcement agencies to combat cybercriminals in the country.

The geoforensic search strategy: A high assurance search method to assist law enforcement locate graves and contraband associated with homicide, counter terrorism and serious and organised crime

The geoforensic search strategy: A high assurance search method to assist law enforcement locate graves and contraband associated with homicide, counter terrorism and serious and organised crime

INTRODUCTION AND IMPORTANCE OF ROBOTICS

What is a robot? "a reprogrammable, multi-functional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through variable programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks" is the definition of an industrial robot given by the robot industries association (ria). The scientific field of robotics focuses on the creation, application, and maintenance of mechanical robots in technology and engineering. The field of robotics is the fusion of science, engineering, and design that produces robots—machines that mimic or replace human behaviour. Pop culture has long piqued the interest of robotics in r2-d2 from the prime optimus. E-wall. Humanoid robot designs generally sound like parodies of the genuine thing. Perhaps they are still more progressive than we realize. With time robots have been gaining structural and intellectual capacities, which does not rule out the potential of an r2-d2 like gadget in the future. In the automotive industry, 90% of all robots were used in the production of cars in 2005. The main element of these robots is mechanical arms used to screw or solder other car parts. As of right now, the field of robotics has expanded and grown to include the development, production, and implementation of robots that can operate in the most difficult environments on earth, assist law enforcement, and even assist in nearly every aspect of healthcare. Even though the automotive industry is still in its infancy, amazing progress has already been made. From the deepest depths of space to the lowest seas, robots are seen accomplishing feats that humans could never imagine. The idea of robotics in the modern world will be addressed in this paper. In the fields of manufacturing and science, robotics is one of the most well-known divisions. Here, engineers work consistently to create robots that can perform specific tasks and produce the right results. As technology advances, every engineer hopes to have a robot with zero errors, but this is becoming increasingly impossible to attain. We can consider it, but 0% still doesn't mean that there won't be any errors—rather, it means that you will always receive the right response to every question.

Registration and the Closure of Stranger-Perpetrated Sex Crimes Reported to Police.

A key goal of sex offender registration is to assist law enforcement in sexual assault investigations; to identify potential suspects when the perpetrator's identity is unknown. To date, however, no research has assessed the utility of sex offender registries in closing cases of sexual assault when the incident involved stranger perpetrators. Addressing this gap, the study drew on the National Incident-Based Reporting System (1992-2001) to test the effect of registry implementation on closure of stranger-involved sex crimes across six states. Comparing closure speeds from before and after registration began in each state, multivariate survival models showed incidents of stranger-perpetrated sexual assault were cleared 23% to 28% faster post-registration implementation. Incidents with juvenile victims and incidents with additional crimes beyond the sexual assault also closed significantly faster (regardless of whether a registry existed).