Using Pattern Analysis and Systematic Randomness to Allocate U.S. Border Security Resources.

摘要

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has the responsibility to protect and control U.S. borders against terrorist threats, criminal endeavors, illegal immigration, and contraband. Unfortunately, due to budgetary and other resource constraints, DHS cannot 'see and be' everywhere at once along America's long and porous border. As a result, DHS officials continually face the question of where, when, and how to position people and technology on the border. Confronting this problem in the context of the land- based border between ports of entry, agents from the Office of Border Patrol (OBP) are investigating how pattern and trend analysis and systematic randomness can be used to position border security personnel and equipment in the places and at the times they will be most effective. Pattern and trend analysis refers to predictive methods that can identify regularities in the times, places, or tactics that interdicted border crossers have historically employed. Systematic randomness, in a sense the antithesis of pattern and trend analysis, refers to the insertion of unpredictability into planning with the hopes mitigating adversary adaptation by introducing uncertainty into smuggler decisionmaking. This report investigates how pattern and trend analysis may be productively coupled with systematic randomness to increase interdiction rates and mitigate smuggler adaptation. We shed light on these issues by addressing three research questions: * How can OBP leverage pattern and trend analysis and systematic randomness to increase its interdiction rate. * Under what circumstances would OBP stations benefit from using comparable approaches. Under what circumstances would approaches differ; * How should OBP start implementing approaches to pattern and trend analysis and systematic randomness.