Catching drug traffickers and illegal aliens with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning The innovative approach that helped US Border Patrol seize two million pounds of cannabis and apprehend one million illegal aliens
A Assistant Chief Patrick Stewart – United States Border Patrol, US
ustralia’s federal, state and local law enforcement and border patrol agencies are facing unprecedented challenges in their fight to secure the nation’s borders and stay a step ahead of criminals. Advancement in technology – such as biometrics, automation and Artificial Intelligence – offer opportunities to improve capabilities – however, as the technology used by national security agencies becomes more sophisticated, so too does the approach of the criminals they are working to apprehend. So how can we effectively plan, prepare and respond to outpace the would-be perpetrators? Washington-based Assistant Chief Patrick Stewart – Branch Chief of the Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) program for the United States Border Patrol and the program lead for U.S Customs and Border Protection – believes the answer lies with geospatial technology. Assistant Chief Stewart and his team have set global benchmarks in developing innovative Geographic Information System (GIS) technology solutions that support risk-informed, intelligencedriven operations. This has enabled the US Border Patrol (USBP) to significantly strengthen its operations, including apprehending nearly a million illegal aliens and seizing more than two million pounds of cannabis since 2016.
The Role of GIS Technology Our enterprise geospatial solution is called ‘eGIS’ – a portal that consolidates all our data and enforcement information on apprehensions, seizures, significant incidents, intelligence reports and realtime detection activity. The system is built on the ArcGIS platform and allows us to visualise critical information and insights on a map as it unfolds, so we can make decisions based off the most complete view of a situation possible. It has been a game changer for border protection and is a solution we 18 | Australian Security Magazine
continue to invest in and evolve with. It underpins most of our operations at USBP and we’re increasingly opening access to the solution to other government departments and agencies – to share data and insights that may be valuable to their operations or jointmissions. We use GIS technology in almost every aspect of our border security – and I can confidently say our operations are faster and better all-around with GIS. One of the most important things we can do with the technology is look at a problem area and understand our challenges and deficiencies in border protection. GIS has allowed us to better assess the areas in which people are getting away from us, and scrutinise the ‘why’ so we can plan a better response in future. With GIS, we begin to understand the total flow of traffic getting into the US – and see how or why some suspects may be evading enforcement. Previously, without GIS technology we were limited to tracking suspects based on wide areas using landmarks. For example, we may have recorded that we saw three people at a particular area on our border – and we would go back over our records and see that collectively we’ve had 20 people who had escaped via this window. Because it was so large – let’s just say an area with a one-mile radius – suspects could have got away from us from anywhere in this window. Now with GIS technology, we can provide and record the exact coordination of the location where people got away from us. We can very clearly identify traffic patterns of where suspects are coming from or going. We can fuse that information up with the location of known established trails, stash houses and the highway system, to get an accurate understanding of where suspects are likely heading. Essentially, we can create a real-time map of each movement they have made. With this insight, we can effectively track these people down. We know they’re going two miles up the interstate highway to a stash house, and we can find them and catch them. As a result, we have significantly less people getting away from us now –