Abstract

HunchLab: Crime Early Warning System for the Philadelphia Police Department
Track: Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice
Authors: Robert Cheetham, Mike Uriciuoli

Police Departments generate enormous volumes of data. While CompStat and other approaches have brought GIS and data analysis into the management process, a lot of data cannot be examined on an ongoing basis. HunchLab is a geographic data mining and alerting system that combines GIS technology with spatial statistics to automatically sift through millions of police incident records on a daily basis and analyze changes in the prevalence of crime and other incidents by comparing the most recent events against historical data for a given location. When HunchLab finds an emerging cluster of incidents, it dispatches e-mail alerts to appropriate personnel. Law enforcement personnel can then use an ArcGIS Server web application to examine events that led to the alert and take action. This presentation will outline the current development status of the HunchLab effort and demonstrate how HunchLab is being implemented and used by law enforcement personnel in Philadelphia.

Robert Cheetham
Azavea
340 N 12th Street, Suite 402
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107
United States
Phone: 215-701-7713
E-mail: cheetham@azavea.com

Mike Uriciuoli
Philadelphia Police Department
8th and Race Streets
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19107
United States
Phone: 215-686-1577
E-mail: michael.uriciuoli@phila.gov