How complexity theory is changing the role of analysis in law enforcement and national security

Abstract

The Science of Complexity is primarily concerned with the examination and understanding of the workings of complex adaptive systems and we argue that crime and terrorism are examples of complex adaptive systems. In this chapter we explore the implications of this for the detection and prevention of organised crime and the role information technology has to play in this. In order to exploit mass collections of Counter Terrorist, Organised Crime and Human Trafficking data we need intelligent methods of exploiting the ability to compare or combine any item of data with any other item of data as well as to routinely undertake various types of inferential and statistical analytical calculations and combinatorial experiments (correlations) upon the data. We must also be aware of the fact that we can never gain total knowledge of the present state, measurement always falls short of certain accuracy and, it simply is not possible to recover “everything” about a given state of affairs. Systems evolve, change and evolve again simply as a result of the interaction of those constituent parts over time and as a result of their individual rule sets. By examining evidence about past and present events we can begin to draw a range of both linear and non-linear inferences about future events.