The current policing landscape has seen the rise in serious and organized crime across the globe. Criminals are innovating in real-time leveraging cyber, social media, enhanced surveillance to support their activities. In so doing, the criminal landscape has become transnational whereby collaborative networks have flourished thereby creating greater complexity and novel threats for the international policing community. As new threats to local, regional, national and global security are emerging, leveraging science and technology innovations has become more important. Advances in big data analytics, cyber forensics, surveillance, modeling and simulation has led to a more data driven, hypothesis generated and model informed approach. Novel science and technology innovations are presented in this edited book to provide insights and pathways that challenges the emerging and complex criminal threat landscape by supporting policing operations.

Anthony Masys is an Associate Professor, Strategic Area Lead for Interdisciplinary Science and Practice and Director of Global Disaster Management, Humanitarian Assistance and Homeland Security. A former senior Air Force Officer, Masys has a BSc in Physics and MSc in Underwater Acoustics and Oceanography from the Royal Military College of Canada and a PhD from the University of Leicester. He is Editor in Chief for Springer Publishing book series: Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications and holds various advisory board positions with academic journals and books series. Masys is an internationally recognized author, speaker and facilitator and has held workshops on security, visual thinking, design thinking and systems thinking in Europe, Canada, South America, West Africa and Asia. He has published extensively in the domains of physics and the social sciences. Joan A. Reid, Ph.D., LMHC is an Associate Professor of Criminology at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg. She has conducted research on human trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, and family violence. Reid has authored over 40 research reports, journal articles, and other publications chiefly focused on human trafficking of minors in the U.S. Bryanna Fox is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminology and Courtesy Professor in the Department of Mental Health, Law, and Policy at the University of South Florida. She earned her Ph.D. in psychological criminology from the University of Cambridge in England. She is a former FBI Special Agent and former research fellow in the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit (BSU) in Quantico. Fox has been recognized with the 2018 Outstanding Paper Award for her article in the Journal of Criminal Psychology, the 2014 Nigel Walker Prize for Outstanding PhD Research from the University of Cambridge, and the 2013 Excellence in Law Enforcement Research Award from the International Association of Chiefs of Police for her experimental study on the impact of statistical behavioral analysis used in active police investigations. Her research focuses on the identification of psychological and developmental risk factors for criminal behavior, developing evidence-based tools for law enforcement, and conducting experimental field research.