ARTICLE
March 2025
Tackling Knife Crime with OSINT:
How Technology can Support Law Enforcement
By Dave Sampson, Altia Consultant
No one can fail to be affected by the devastation caused by knife crime especially given the proportion who are children and young adults. According to the Ben Kinsella Trust there were 262 murders in the year to March 2024, and 57 of those were under 25.* Working at a business based in Nottingham, the challenge has very much been brought home; last month there were three incidents in the city centre involving knifes, including two stabbings, in the space of just a week.
The government has pledged to half knife crime over the next decade and has announced measures to make it harder to sell and buy knives online, along with a commitment to support a new policing unit with £1m of funding to monitor the sale of weapons online.
Being quoted by the BBC**, Commander Stephen Clayman, who led the NPCC review into online knife sales, said:
“They are being quite clever about it in the way they don’t overtly sell. But they show all the knives and encourage people to move to a different [online] platform to make the transaction.
“If they are selling knives and we can prove it, we will take legal action and ask for the content to be removed.”
I believe OSINT (open-source intelligence) tools and technology will be critical to not only the new unit who’ve been tasked with the role of monitoring online sales of knives, but also any force keen to keep an eye on what weapons could be making their way into their community – from who and into who’s hands.
OSINT can include data from the surface, deep and dark web, including public records, news, social media platforms, websites, copy, images and videos. Using specialist technology means that it can be fast to identify threat and lines of investigation from vast quantities of data. It makes it possible to automate the scanning of forums, market places and encrypted messaging platforms and can track illicit transactions and new marketplace listings. However, one of the challenges I have experienced myself through my own law enforcement career has been that the tools can be complicated to use, requiring the expertise of a specialist team which can cause bottlenecks and delays. In the fast-moving online marketplace, this is far from ideal.
The features I recommend forces look for if they are considering how OSINT tools could help are:
- A tool that is easy-to-use and enables investigators to self-serve
- Full audit trail capture, to ensure any information used as evidence is admissible
- A perpetual search capability to enable proactive monitoring of specific URLs and key words
- Ability to integrate data provided by the public, which is easy to use by citizens and offers full anonymity
- An integration with case management to streamline the production of court-ready documents
- Compliance with data capture and retention regulations
Quite rightly it has been widely commented that knife crime is a complex societal issue and a much wider challenge than just the approach to policing. However, technology can play a role in making police more efficient and effective in monitoring the threat and gathering the evidence needed to support prosecutions. It’s one step forward towards our shared goal of making our communities safer.
* https://benkinsella.org.uk/knife-crime-statistics/
** https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g0ldgvnx3o
