Photo/Sam Freeman Forsyth County Sheriff's Department Crime Analyst Karen DeLany confers with Omega Group Representative Bob Henry.

Karen DeLany's job is to make sense out of the never-ending stream of names, addresses and numbers that flow into the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office.

Hired last month for the newly-created position of crime analyst, DeLany condenses the reams of reports generated by the agency into succinct summaries. She held the same job in Gwinnett County for three years. "It's my job to look for trends and problems, dissect them, and get that information out on the road so crime can be prevented before it occurs," DeLany said. "I'll be tracking all the statistics."

Crime analysts, long in use by federal agencies and larger metropolitan police forces, are becoming increasingly common in the ranks of medium-sized departments. While line officers and their commanders are often too busy responding to incidents, crime analysts have the time and resources to see the trees in the forest, as it were.

"It could be a gas station where several crimes have occurred over a period of time because there isn't a light post there," DeLany said. "We're able to take a proactive approach and give information to commanders so that they can know where they need to allocate their resources."

DeLany will be aided in her efforts by a new computer software program that generates crime maps from the thousands of arrest, incident and accident reports that the sheriff's records division enters into a database.

Unit commanders got a tutorial on the CrimeView Geographic Information System this week, learning how to pose questions and extrapolate answers from reddish-hued county maps spackled with dots of yellow and orange.

Before the advent of such software, "people would just use pins on maps, essentially," said Greg Dixon, a senior project manager for The Omega Group, the San Diego-based software firm that has sold its system to more than 250 law enforcement agencies since 1991, including Gwinnett and DeKalb counties.

Geographic Information Systems aren't new to Forsyth. The county uses computerized, gridded maps for everything from planning and zoning to engineering and public works.

Tracking crime on the maps, however, is new. "This adds another toolbar to what we already have," said Bob Langley, system administrator with Forsyth County's Information Technology Department. "It's an extension of what just about every department uses now."

The sheriff's department divides the county into eight sectors, or "beats," with each beat split into "A" and "B" zones. The new software enables DeLany and the department's unit commanders to analyze each zone for not-so-noticable trends, including the most common times or days of the week in which certain crimes occur. For something as common as car break-ins "you can sit down in five minutes and get information that took two weeks to get before," said Capt. Mark Flowers.

With Forsyth still among the fastest-growing counties in the nation -- with a 34 percent population increase since 2000 -- DeLany knows her job will only become more complex with time.

"As the population grows, crime, too, will increase," she said.

Originally published Sunday, April 17, 2005