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Track: Emergency Management and Public Safety
David Nulph
Indus Corporation
908 N Wayne Street Suite 105
Arlington, VA 22201
Telephone: 202-514-9947
Fax: 202-616-7590
E-mail: dnulph@induscorp.com
Alex Mudd, Jeffrey Burka
Technical Approach to Developing a Spatial Crime Analysis System with ArcView GIS
Defining Issue: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the methods used to develop and implement an ArcView-based spatial crime analysis system that will enable police departments to geographically analyze incident-based data. GIS Solution: The Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice initiated two pilot projects to implement GIS for use in crime analysis at local police departments: Warrenton, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland. The crime analysis application developed was first installed at Warrenton, a very small police department, then with some enhancements and added capabilities at the Montgomery County Police Department. Application requirements: The key requirements of the system include an easy-to-use database query interface, the ability to produce several varieties of analytical maps and reports, and the flexibility to be installed on different systems with a minimum of reprogramming. Methodology: The core application functionality was built around ArcView using Avenue.
Additional functionality was provided by the ArcView Spatial Analyst extension, which allowed the rapid inclusion of the features such as "hot spot" analysis and crime density surface map generation. To achieve all the application requirements, several additional components were integrated into the ArcView environment: Visual Basic forms were designed to handle user interface needs and communicate to ArcView via DDE. Report generation capability was added by directly linking ArcView to the Crystal Reports report generator engine DLL. Database connectivity issues were resolved by standardizing the application on ODBC SQL. In addition, as more programmers were added to the development team, it became necessary to design a code management system. This system, which was created as an extension, permits multiple developers to be working on the same code base simultaneously. The resulting application is currently in use at the two police departments, and the Department of Justice Criminal Division GIS staff
continue to enhance and customize the application to optimize it to the police departments' needs.
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