Participation Assignment

The article I choose to report on concerned the Ogden, Utah Police Department’s use of GIS technology to improve their ability to handle the “suppression, detection, and investigation of crime”.  The Department has created what they call a Real Time Crime Center (RTCC).   This system is the result of over 10 years of improvements.  

The goal of their project was to maximize the efficiency of their staff of 144 sworn officers in their community of 85,000 residents.   In the past they had used the ESRI line of products to analyze their criminal incident information, but it wasn’t until 2008 when they started deploying what they call “significant enhancements”.  These included dynamic hot spot mapping (which shows the intensity levels of criminal activity spatially), improved web access (making the information easier to retrieve for its officers), and Automated Vehicle Location (which allowed them to see the location of all their vehicles in real time).  Another technology they embrace is from an ESRI Partner is called “Pictometry”.    This allows their staff to look at aerial imagery not only from the top-down view, but also from all 4 directions.   This helps them detect features such as cover where a criminal might be hidden.   The Pictometry is of special interest to me as I have started using it as part of my Internship Process.  In the news recently it looks like Apple and Google will both be tackling this type of imagery, so it will be interesting to see if they will be able to implement this technology in Ogden as well.

The Ogden Police Department really took the RTCC to new levels of usefulness in 2011 when they began to integrate other data into the system such as local warrants, criminal history, jail data, arrest affidavits, and property information.    This helped improve the frequency of data retrieval from the system from monthly (in some cases) down to near-real time.   They have developed their systems to be standards compliant with the Microsoft Fusion Core Solution (MFCS) which is the result of a partnership between Microsoft and ESRI.   They describe the MFCS system as “an easy-to-use, quick-to-configure solution that combines the robust capabilities of the Esri ArcGIS Advanced Enterprise Server and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2010”  They can add data sources from numerous third party data providers such as surveillance cameras, a blimp, and briefing notes.

This article really inspired me to look at some of the processes where I work currently.  We gather real time data in several systems that could be really beneficial to see in a near real-time spatial web application.   We generate some reports for board meetings that would be a whole lot more useful if they were pulled up on a live web site.   Now if I only had the free time…..