NC4 Signal leverages social media to fight crime

NC4, a safety and security company, announced on Oct. 27 the general availability of a new addition to its crime-fighting suite, NC4 Signal, a social media monitoring solution.

NC4 Signal takes advantage of the Microsoft Azure Government platform and can be deployed quickly and managed easily. NC4 Signal brings law enforcement a powerful suite of tools to leverage social media in developing intelligent insight for the purpose of preventing and investigating criminal activity.

The pervasive use of social media is punctuated by incidents such as the London riots; civil unrest in Ferguson, MO; and the Boston marathon bombing. NC4 Signal is designed to filter through the endless flow of information across major social media platforms, like Twitter and Facebook, and presents users with a customized stream of rich, relevant data in real-time. It allows users to define filtering parameters to gather information based on their specific needs, and then visualize that information into maps and lists. Users can quickly:

• Pinpoint information by street address, city or state, or other landmarks;
• Monitor topics, words and phrases;
• Track activity and developments as they unfold;
• Identify current trends or research historical data.

“While social media monitoring is not new to policing, having a powerful yet simple-to-use tool, like NC4 Signal, is new to the crime-fighting landscape,” said Robert Wolf, Vice President of NC4 Public Safety. “NC4 Signal lets officers quickly filter through social media’s massive volume of information to better understand a situation, and then integrate this information into strategic, tactical and operational decision-making to ensure optimum results.”