Crime Analysis was developed under a cooperative agreement awarded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to ESRI. ESRI took a consortium approach toward the technical development of the software. Participants in the consortium include:
The National Center for Geographic Information Analysis (NCGIA) at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo
Salinas, California Police Department
San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department
Los Angeles Police Department Crime Analysis Unit
An additional set of law enforcement agencies from across the country provided testing and review of the application.
Crime Analysis is a specialized extension for one of the most popular desktop GIS systems, ArcView GIS. It is designed to provide easy-to-use tools for geographic crime analysis, data management, mapping, and reporting. Each task is performed with the help of a wizard, a series of panels (screens) that guide you through the tasks you want to perform.
Because incident data can be organized by geography (location of the crime) in addition to things like offender name, time of day, and type of crime, it can be displayed in a GIS. Crime Analysis will allow you to find the data for a certain time frame and area of jurisdiction and display it on a map. The map can include nearby landmarks like streets and schools, and different colors and symbols can be used for different crime categories, painting a real picture of the data and making it easier to interpret.
Once incident data is depicted on a map, the possibilities for further geographic analysis are wide open. You can conduct further analysis to identify the boundaries of "hot spots," determine proximity to schools or gang territories, and generate reports summarizing events.
Often, presenting information on a map provides a new perspective, and trends and patterns become more apparent. Crime Analysis provides tools that will help you better understand the community you are responsible for and the problems you are administering so that informed decisions can be made.
Using Crime Analysis requires ArcView GIS 3.2 with the Spatial Analyst extension. Crime Analysis has been tested on the NT Version 4.0, Windows 95, and Windows 98 platforms.
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