Geography plays an important role in assisting law enforcement to meet their mission of providing community safety and security. Response capabilities can often rely on a variety of data from multiple agencies and multiple sources. GIS provides a valuable spatial element to traditional crime analysis tools via crime mapping. GIS facilitates predictive modeling or forecasting to manage investigative efforts and enables agencies to quickly redistrict police areas or beats to balance workloads and more effectively deploy scarce resources in their communities. GIS enables agencies to map and share analysis within and among agencies via an Intranet while it also provides a means of sharing this information with the public through the Internet.

The Internet makes GIS a powerful tool for community policing and an extremely effective tool in intelligence-led policing efforts to support community-based efforts such as reducing the impact of drugs and gangs. It can also be used to enlist the support and involvement of a community's citizens as they can search the police ArcIMS site to look at crime trends in their neighborhoods. GIS can also be used to inform communities of the presence of registered sex offenders in their neighborhoods through a Megan's Law Web site. Finally, it enables law enforcement and other city agencies to use nontraditional data coupled with crime data to identify, evaluate, and respond to existing or emerging community issues (e.g., blight, housing, recreation, juvenile, or senior issues) and to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

GIS provides law enforcement aviation with the capability of in-flight "moving" maps and automated vehicle location for patrol vehicles. It is used to immediately identify and map the locations of gunshots in urban areas, provide emergency notification for evacuations by geographic area, examine traffic safety in the community, manage critical events, and many other activities. Virtually every operational activity in law enforcement has many spatial relationships, and GIS provides a powerful, visual, decision making tool for investigators, supervisors, and administrators alike.

For more information, visit www.esri.com/lawenforce on the Web.