Combining and Analyzing Judicial Databases - Discrimination and Privacy in the Information Society - page 185

follows. Together, these steps from reporting a crime to the execution of sanctions
are referred to as the criminal law chain . This chain thus consists of four phases:
investigation, prosecution, trial, and execution. The police, prosecution service,
courts, and the organizations that execute sanctions collaborate in this chain. Each
organization registers relevant data, for instance, about the case and the suspect, in
its own data source.
To define an effective and coherent safety policy, policymakers have a practical
need for statistical insights into the registered data. 1 Such insights can only be
gained by relating and integrating the data in a coherent manner. For instance,
when data from the different co-operating organizations are integrated and
compared, it can be investigated how specific groups of suspects or criminal pro-
ceedings move through the chain. Also, by monitoring flows within or between
organizations in the chain, policymakers are able to observe whether there are po-
tential problems in a certain part of the chain.
In the Netherlands, combined crime data have already been distributed offline
(in topic form) for several years. 2 Although the statistical yearbook is very useful
in its current form, there is a growing demand for online data from different
groups of users. Therefore, several attempts have been made to develop tools or
information systems that collect and process safety-related data from relevant
sources and present them in an integrated and uniform way to the users. 3 Such
tools obviously have potential, but should be developed with care, as they may al-
so provoke undesired effects. One of the core issues here is the protection of the
privacy of individuals. Data should be processed, collected, and combined in a
way that respects privacy laws and regulations. In general, privacy has a subjec-
tive nature and is open to different interpretations depending on its context. In the
context of public safety, privacy is primarily focused on the non-disclosure of the
identity of individuals. A related issue is the discrimination of groups of individu-
als, that is, the prejudiced treatment of individuals because they belong to a certain
group. To minimize the risk of discrimination or stigmatization, combined crime
data should be presented and analyzed with caution.
In this chapter, it will be described how judicial data can be collected, com-
bined, and analyzed such that the privacy of individuals in society is not violated.
It is explained that although IT offers great potentials to automate the collection
and combination of data, still a significant manual effort is required to ensure data
quality and to avoid undesired effects. A dataspace approach is presented that al-
lows one to efficiently relate and exploit data from different sources. It is demon-
strated how the information needs of judicial policymakers can be fulfilled using
this approach. To analyze data, besides traditional statistical techniques, contem-
porary techniques such as data mining can be employed. However, it is argued
that the straightforward application of such data analysis techniques on judicial
1 Choenni, S., van Dijk, J. & Leeuw, F. (2010), Choenni, S. & Leertouwer, E. (2010), Kali-
dien, S., Choenni, S. & Meijer, R. (2009), Kalidien, S., Choenni, S. & Meijer, R. (2010).
2 De Heer-de Lange, N.E.& Kalidien, S. (2010), Kalidien, S. & De Heer-de Lange, N.E.
(2011).
3 Choenni, S. & Leertouwer, E. (2010), Choenni, S., Kalidien, S., Ariel, A. & Moolenaar,
D. (2001).