ATF mines data to support investigations

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The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives plans to expand the use of data analytics to improve investigations into the increasing number of gun store burglaries.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives plans to mine its data and expand the use of data analytics to improve its investigations, including gun store robberies and burglaries, according to the agency's CIO.

"We have really just started pushing data analytics within ATF," said CIO Roger Beasley. In the coming fiscal year, Beasley said the agency will unify its many data pools, with the goal of giving its agents a more granular picture of the data housed in its systems.

In remarks during an Oct. 8 AFFIRM online cybersecurity event, Beasley said data analytics can help ATF agents in real time with gun store robberies and burglaries, which have been growing at an alarming rate, with hundreds of stores hit every year.

"We have many systems across the bureau, like any other federal agency. They are individual pots of gold if you can pull it all together and begin to mine that information,” he said. “Up until this point, we really did not exploit that."

ATF is combining criminal enforcement data on break-ins with GIS data on gun store locations to build targeted alerts to other gun stores in areas where break-ins occur.

"We're pulling that information from a criminal enforcement database and using Esri data to grab and pull those local stores within a 50 mile radius of where that burglary occurred and try to alert them ahead of time, so they can be prepared," he said. "It's typically not just one store that's going to get hit in an area."

This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.

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