Digital innovation in crime prevention. How the Ukrainian startup Crimedatalab works
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In our recurring Who Are These People segment, Vector offers founders an opportunity to discuss their projects, covering aspects such as their products, marketing strategies, monetisation, investments, and business plans. The focus this time is on the Ukrainian startup Crimedatalab, which developed an online platform to integrate publicly available data on crime statistics in Ukraine, offering a range of analytics tools.
Editor-in-chief Yuliia Tkach interviewed Mykola Karchevskyi, Crimedatalab’s CEO and founder, about the product’s features, promotion, investments, and business plans.
Conception
The project was launched by Prof. Mykola Karchevskyi, Doctor of Law. His impressive academic career spanning more than 20 years has included positions at Luhansk State University of Internal Affairs and Lviv State University of Internal Affairs. He is now a professor in the Department of Law and Public Administration at King Danylo University in Ivano-Frankivsk. In addition, he is a visiting lecturer at the School of Law at Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).
The Crimedatalab project was initiated in 2021 when Mykola Karchevskyi presented an offline collection of R-generated infographics from official open data to the scientific community. In 2023, he was awarded a research grant from the National Scientific Research Foundation of Ukraine and the University of Cambridge. The findings of the grant-funded research are the cornerstone of the platform.
Karchevskyi put together a project team during the Open Data Hackathon Ukraine 2024 leading to the launch of the CrimeDataLab platform the same year.
«Are we aware of the social impact of the criminal justice system? Are police officers, prosecutors, and courts effectively carrying out their responsibilities? Are the practices within the criminal justice system fair and transparent to the public? I would be thrilled to say “yes” to all these questions. Sadly, the actual situation is somewhat different.
The current criminal justice system reminds me of once-engaged teachers who have lost their passion for the job. They are apathetic about the value their lectures provide to the students. They do just enough to remain in their positions and cannot be dismissed because they are respectable individuals who have been part of the system for many years. In a devious way, they discreetly cause distress to themselves, the students, and management.
We frequently overlook the need for critical reflection of our actions; at times, we find solace in rationalisations such as “it’s not the right time” or “this issue is of importance only to the experts”. I believe the key to the solution is found in the data and the insights we can derive from them», — explains Mykola Karchevskyi, outlining the vision and objective.
At the moment, the team is made up of the founder and six specialists.
Product and audience
CrimeDataLab is a web-based platform designed to integrate open data from official statistics on combating crime in Ukraine, offering user-friendly analytics tools. By converting open data from Ukraine’s official crime statistics into intuitive visualisations, the project enhances cooperation among researchers, individuals, and law enforcement seeking to analyse and prevent crime.
According to the project founder, CrimeDataLab serves as «a bridge between open data and the practical use of that data, so that law enforcement and the judicial system can identify criminal trends and make decisions based on data». Essentially, the team converts unwieldy and complex spreadsheets of statistical reports into visual formats such as diagrams, graphs, dashboards, and cartograms.
The platform is now publicly accessible: anyone can freely interact with the data and visualisations without having to subscribe or register. The product has 500 users.
CrimeDataLab operates on the following principle:
- Data is gathered through the automated retrieval of reports from the websites of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office and the State Judicial Administration.
- Data cleaning scripts have been designed after analysing the structural characteristics of incoming reports. These files help users access the parameters associated with criminal law that they need. The parameters are associated with specific articles of the Special Part of the Criminal Code and are free of any table formatting, summary lines, headings, etc.
- Using the «clean» data obtained in the previous stage, automated processing scripts generate selections and generalisations for the purposes of visual representation. Visualisation is achieved through the execution of scripts that incorporate the selections from the previous stage and use standard libraries for graphical data representation.
The project was developed using R and Shiny R packages A software environment designed to facilitate the creation of interactive web applications with a graphical interface based on the R programming language. .
The target audience of CrimeDataLab, as defined by the team, includes anyone in Ukraine, NGOs, government officials, politicians, lawyers, journalists, scientists, law students, as well as international and foreign partners.
Business model and marketing strategy
«Given the limited access to open data related to crime prevention in Ukraine, grant support is the only viable funding model for CrimeDataLab at this time. Nonetheless, we anticipate the potential for developing a B2B model once sufficient amounts of data are uncovered.
This will enable us to offer commercial products for the security and insurance sectors, among other industries, as well as local governments. To illustrate, one focus area might be territorial crime and safety indices, which could serve as a valuable tool for decision-making among businesses and government agencies.
This demonstrates the direct relationship between the government’s data openness policies and the potential for developing new services in the area of security analytics. To ensure the product reaches a wider audience, we will carry out an educational campaign and create a scientific centre, organising a conference to engage the scientific community with the platform. The objective is to provide researchers with a tool that enriches scientific discourse with practical arguments. As the community and researchers work with factual data, the process will become quick and efficient, leading to more rational discussions with law enforcement agencies. Communities and the academic sector will generate clear, data-driven observations. Law enforcement responses will become more specific».
Investments
The project received its first investment in the form of a $12,000 grant for research work
provided by the National Research Foundation of Ukraine and the University of Cambridge (UK).
In December 2024, the team secured $30,000 from the sponsors of the Open Data Accelerator 2024. The funds will be allocated to carry out an educational campaign, set up a research centre, advance the platform’s technical features, and introduce an AI assistant. The latter is seen as a new milestone in enhancing the availability of data on combating crime in Ukraine.
Future investments will focus on developing the educational and research components of the platform.
Plans
«The main goal is to improve the efficiency of combating crime in Ukraine through the provision of structured and visualised open data. Access to data and analytics enables the public, researchers, and government agencies to make well-informed decisions.
Rational decisions promote the optimal use of social resources in the security sector», — summarises Mykola Karchevskyi.
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