Research
CINA pursues a comprehensive set of programs and activities that are designed to equip practitioners, end users, decision makers, and U.S. policy makers in the homeland security enterprise with state-of-the-art knowledge, expertise, methods, tools, and technologies to help combat the growing threat of transnational crime.
While advances in information and communication technologies have benefited education, healthcare, and other crucial areas of society, transnational criminal operations have also taken advantage of technology to evolve, become more agile, and expand their scope. Today, transnational criminal networks can easily appear, disappear, and reorganize in response to operational opportunities and authority gaps.
The evolving CINA research portfolio comprises the following themes:
Criminal Network Analysis
Intended to equip HSE stakeholders with a thorough understanding and knowledge of criminal activity, its evolution, and convergence, ranging from gang activities to money laundering and human trafficking, and the tools to monitor and disrupt these activities.
Dynamic Patterns of Criminal Activity
Intended to provide HSE stakeholders with cutting-edge methods, tools and activities to predict future criminal activities, gang activities, and threats to the US, studying them at the geographical, social, and cyber dimensions.
Forensics
Intended to develop and deploy state-of-the-art forensic methods, tools, and technologies within the HSE community.
Criminal Investigative Processes
Intended to improve HSE end user investigative processes used to detect, pursue and solve transnational criminal activity.
Projects under the above four themes are also addressing issues related to the Future of Law Enforcement Investigations, adding a fifth dimension to our research portfolio.