ESRI Canada - Crime & Investigative Analysis

Crime & Investigative Analysis

Strategic and Tactical Intelligence at Your Fingertips

Crime and investigative analysis is a critical process in law enforcement - a process that can transform data into actionable information. Because every crime has an address or a location, crime mapping enhances this process by providing law enforcement with the geographic advantage. GIS maps traditional statistical information used in crime analysis as well as other data, such as school truancy and community socioeconomics, to gain a more holistic view of crime and its underlying causes.

Through a GIS, you can

Leverage and fuse spatial data to a wide variety of traditional law enforcement data sources.
Provide contextual information and intuition for a more informed response.
Identify and link related or seemingly unrelated crime patterns and trends.
Capture workflows and build models to streamline analytic processes.

An effective intelligence-led policing operation requires a suite of tools and techniques that capture and codify answers to a variety of questions: what, how, why, who, and - perhaps most important for response - where. Where is further investigation needed, and where can the system provide consistent opportunities to enhance law enforcement? GIS and a geographic approach can answer the where, integrating and translating data and information into a coherent, relevant picture.

CrimeAnalyst delivers this technology through a comprehensive set of analytical tools that unlock the value of your incident data. It can be used to support intelligence-led policing, COMSTAT processes, anti-terrorism/force protection, and a wide variety of criminal and national security-related investigations and analysis.

Intelligence-led policing involves many disciplines - crime analysis, intelligence collection, information exploitation, critical infrastructure analysis and protection, and logistics management. Intelligence-led policing also requires multiple sources of data and information, creating a composite, flexible system that can be molded and shaped to attack emerging or existing problems. No matter the discipline or the data, any time the severity of a situation increases, there is a need for an integrated GIS to organize, understand, and manage the data and information around it.

GIS provides solutions that enable law enforcement agencies to

Develop a comprehensive view into the broad activities of the agency.
Prevent data overload by integrating information and transforming it into a coherent, relevant picture.
Support broad strategic and tactical goals, creating more opportunities for proactive policing.
Collaborate and coordinate effectively, getting critical information into and out of the field.

GIS also provides the ability to learn from situations and exploit best practices. Through ModelBuilder in ArcGIS Spatial Analyst, analysts and officers can capture workflows. These workflows can be replicated or modified to attack new crimes and new threats. By saving time and more effectively allocating resources, law enforcement can continually work to fine-tune and improve their efforts.

GIS tools serve the core of intelligence-led policing. The geographic advantage can enable decision makers across the organization with the appropriate and actionable information and intelligence they need.