The landscape of organised crime and terrorism threats is continually evolving, creating a constant challenge for Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to provide effective prediction and prevention solutions, as demonstrated by terrorist attacks in a number of European cities, with the terrorists’ focus shifting to public spaces and other “soft targets”. In particular, the challenges for LEAs are to: (i) effectively correlate all multimodal data streams available during monitoring, operation, and investigation activities; (ii) improve their surveillance and situational awareness capabilities; (iii) collaborate efficiently and effectively across organisational boundaries, jurisdictions, and countries, during joint operations and investigations; and (iv) support the path-to-court.
CREST's overall objective was to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of LEAs intelligence, operation, and investigation capabilities, through the automated detection, identification, assessment, fusion, and correlation of evidence acquired from heterogeneous multimodal data streams. Such data streams include Web and social media sources and interactions, IoT-enabled devices (including wearable sensors), surveillance cameras (static, wearable, or mounted on UxVs), and seized devices and hard disks.
CREST offers: (i) crime and terrorism prediction and prevention through the generation of automatic early warning alerts based on the assessment of threats detected using targeted monitoring, tracking, and analytics technologies; (ii) improved operational capabilities enabled by an IoT ecosystem that facilitates adaptive and dynamic mission planning and navigation based on autonomous systems for better surveillance and distributed planning and management for supporting distributed operational command and control; (iii) improved situational awareness through advanced visual analytics, mobile applications, and projections in interactive augmented reality environments; (iv) enhanced investigation capabilities by increasing the confidence and trustworthiness of information sharing and digital evidence exchange based on blockchain technologies; and (v) Integrated platform based on ethics and privacy-by-design principles, implementing EU legal requirements, whilst being highly customisable to local legislation.
The adoption of the CREST solutions for enhancing the fight against security threats will have impact on how citizens and the civil society interact with the local LEAs and their use of technologies for fighting crime through shaping the citizens’ perception of safety and security, and increasing the security levels of communities and the resilience of Member States in dealing with current and future security threats.
The developed tools and platform were validated in a series of field tests and demonstrations in three Pilot Use Cases: (i) Protection of public figures in motorcades and public spaces, (ii) Counter terrorism security in crowded areas, and (iii) Cross-border fight against organised crime.
