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ESRI (UK) Q and A
In conversation with ESRI (UK) about the rise, benefits, and future of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and why now is time for the police sector to give this technology the attention it deserves.
In October 2008 the BAPCO Journal attended a conference on GIS organised by ESRI (UK), a major supplier in this sector. You can read the report here. As a follow up we invited Simon Cottingham (pictured right), Public Safety Strategist at ESRI (UK), to talk in more detail about the rise of GIS and how it is changing policing, and the further potentials it has to benefit the police, as its potential becomes both better understood, and more fully realised.
BAPCO Journal: How has GIS technology changed in recent years?
Simon Cottingham: We have seen a massive upsurge in the use of GIS in recent years as people have started to better understand its benefits. In the police sector the arrival of a new highly detailed mapping dataset from Ordnance Survey, called MasterMap, has also driven this change. Old police mapping systems could not handle the new data, so it provided an opportunity for forces to examine their use of geospatial data and start to think about the potential for moving from basic digital maps with dots on, towards systems which really exploit the benefits of a geographic approach to problems. One of the biggest challenges for ESRI (UK) has been making people aware of just how big an impact this technology can have.
How can GIS support crime reduction?
One of the key benefits of using modern GIS rather than traditional digital mapping systems is the ability to layer different data together onto a map and analyse relationships between those layers. You can use this data to build up detailed patterns of crime, taking into account factors such as time of day, day of the week, demographic impacts, repeat targets and so on. By overlaying the data, patterns of crime become clearer and can start to inform decision makers, supporting a problem-focused approach to policing. In the past a map would be used to place a crime and that was it. Now officers use our CrimeAnalyst software to plot crimes then plot time and days of the week, building up a temporal data clock (see image at bottom of page), that shows which times of day have the most crimes, and perhaps more uniquely, where small pockets of anomalous data occur. Not only is this more detailed it is also easier to break down and easier to present in the form of graphs or charts, often broken down to for each district or borough so you can see which areas have higher or lower types of different crime.
How does this benefit the end-user in a day-to-day sense?
One of the areas we have been working hard on is to explain the potential for GIS to be used outside its traditional setting of the control room environment and crime analyst groups. GIS software provides real opportunities for delivering better services on a day-to-day basis. If senior officers can better understand the issues through these maps, they can deploy resources more effectively and better deal with problems as they occur more. For example, if a particular street suddenly sees an upsurge in crime on a Wednesday morning, officers can be deployed to that street at that time to react to this. GIS is now playing a key role in helping intelligent resource deployment, for example it can help identify the key locations for Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras. By analysing patterns of criminal movements a force can pinpoint the best junctions and routes for capturing future criminal movements, and by including temporal aspects of this historic intelligence data it can even suggest the best time of day or day of the week to deploy these resources.
What about for large-scale events?
ESRI (UK) are taking an active role in demonstrating the potential for GIS to be used to plan for and react to the type of flood events that we have seen in Britain in recent years. Flood events require a multi-agency approach, bringing together not just people, but information from many agencies, and making sense of that information in real time, to support critical decisions. Our unique position as the main supplier of GIS systems to local government, central government, utilities, and the MOD mean that there is a wealth of information within these organisations, in ESRI (UK) compatible formats, ready to be put together in case of major emergencies. In the case of a flooding event this might include mapping flood risk zones, analysing population within that area, identifying potential resources and risks in the affected areas (e.g. buildings which could act as evacuation centres, or electricity substations which may cause secondary disruption to the flood response).
This model can also be applied for terrorism events, event management – such as the 2012 Olympics – and other one-off events. Doing all this using GIS makes it far easier to build up a good, clear system from which to operate from and have a clear understanding of a situation as it unfolds.
How will the technology progress from here?
There are three main areas into which this technology will go.
Firstly, a move towards web-enabled service-based sharing of information will aid the ability of all the emergency services to work together with other responders. By having a shared picture between agencies, with each agency able to see information critical to them as layers within the same map layers, the potential for most effective use of resources greatly enhanced. Senior decisions makers will also be freed up to make decisions, rather than wasting valuable time trying to construct a picture of the situation in their heads. The shared services approach offers real potential for rapid decision making, for quickly identifying risks, and for managing an event at both a tactical and strategic level.
Secondly there is a move towards making data live on the map. So, for instance, a police officer or an ambulance’s position on the map will be broadcast live to the control room via transponder systems. This would provide time saving benefits so, for example, if a police car was seen returning from a call and passing through an area they weren’t scheduled to patrol but the controller could see they were nearby on a map they could be directed to the scene immediately. This would be quicker than sending a vehicle that might be on patrol in that area, but was, at that moment, further away.
Finally, there is a desire to make geospatial data available on the streets, whether that be through a PDA device with a map on it, or simply a device that can ask a geographic question such as ‘Where are my three nearest resources based on travel time?’. Last year was an important time for mobile data in the emergency services and 2009 will offer new opportunities to link geospatial content to those new applications and processes.
Final thoughts:
Education on the advantages of GIS for policing is one of our key goals. Forces are starting to identify new ways to tackle crime problems, and new ways to drive efficiency within their business, as they start to understand the power of this technology. Identifying champions within emergency services who recognize these opportunities is vital to push adoption further.
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