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Track: Emergency Management and Public Safety
John DeVoe
United States Government
1400 New York Avenue NW Room 7120
Washington, DC 20530
Telephone: 202-514-8510
Fax: 202-616-7590
E-mail: crm_gis@access.digex.net
Robert Bratt, Thomas Didone
The U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, Spatial Crime Analysis System Implementation at the Montgomery County Police Department
Objective: This paper will present the initial findings and early success of the Criminal Division and Montgomerty County Police Department GIS initiative. The paper will discuss MCPD's tactical and operational requirements from both a user's perspective and a managerial perspective and the Criminal Division's GIS program functions that were completed to fulfill those requirements. Further, this paper will address the operational adjustments that were necessary at MCPD in order to maximize the effectiveness of the GIS program. Background: On April 1, 1996, the Criminal Division, U.S. Department of Justice, and MCPD formed a partnership through the National Institute of Justice to develop a spatial crime analysis system for MCPD. The Criminal Division and MCPD worked closely together to identify MCPD's GIS needs. The Criminal Division expects to deliver its Spatial Crime Analysis System to MCPD headquarters and two of the five police districts in January 1997. The three remaining districts, which will
be the last of the districts to receive fiber optic cabling and therefore GIS, will receive the Spatial Crime Analysis System by March 31, 1997. The Criminal Division's application was built using ArcView Version 3.0 with Spatial Analyst and a Visual Basic front end. 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. Project Goals: The Criminal Division and MCPD believe that GIS is the catalyst to better policing. The Criminal Division's Spatial Crime Analysis System, developed using ArcView Version 3.0 and Spatial Analyst with a Visual Basic 4.0 front end, allows crime analysts to query and analyze crime data spatially and search for trends in criminal activity. Because MCPD crime analysts' conclusions and discoveries have a direct impact on MCPD operations, the Criminal Division
and MCPD believe that GIS is vital to the continued improvement of the Crime Analysis Unit and MCPD's emergency tactical response. The goals of this project are to broaden and change the perspectives of MCPD analysts by spatially analyzing crime across police district boundaries; make more informed and accurate officer deployment division; improve the tactical planning and anti / terrorism strategies of the Special Operations Division; provide more meaningful information in the form of maps to the community and improve police / community relations; and document for other police departments how GIS changes the very nature of crime analysis including, but not limited to, the types of queries performed and the frequency of those queries, the ratio of "regular" to "ad hoc" queries, and the dissemination of the query products and maps within MCPD.
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