"It cost just under $20,000 to get our crime analysis software up and running," Captain Jim Bueermann, Redlands Police Department said. They're using a new desktop reporting, mapping and analysis package called CrimeView to track gangs, predict trouble spots and quickly warn personnel of potentially dangerous situations.

The outbox system also helps the Department tackle many of the tasks formerly reserved for organizations that could afford customized, high dollar crime analysis setups. Now Redlands easily creates digital maps that help them do flexible, dynamic beat staffing; establish incident patterns; locate parolees and other registrants; map drug arrests in relationship to schools, liquor stores or landmarks; target accident prone intersections, and much more.

Easy to use? Sure, if you're a trained crime analyst, right? Not necessarily, Bueermann said. The Department had a full time crime analyst for a couple of years. When that individual switched jobs, however, funding cutbacks put a hold on replacing him. "When we lost our analyst last fall, I wondered how we could keep our program going," Bueermann said. "We had to work out a way to do crime analysis with the resources at hand."

Bueermann explored the idea of training a records clerk to produce maps and reports. "It wasn't that difficult," he said. 'She caught on very quickly." CrimeView displays three buttons: Reports, Maps or Analysis. Everything is reduced to two or three steps instead of the 12 or 13 normal steps in a traditional GIS (geographic information system). "It's a big breakthrough," Bueermann said. He likened it to the advent of the automatic transmission in the auto industry. "You used to have to know how to use the clutch, gas pedal and shift all at the same time. Now, you just put it in drive and go."

The ability to map out crime is making a tangible difference. "If we have a series of residential break-ins or auto thefts, we map the locations and look at the cluster," Bueermann said. "Then we overlay a digital map of all our burglary or auto theft parolees in that vicinity. That gives us some names and addresses to start with.

"We had a case where some elementary school age girls were approached in an alley," Bueermann said. "We put it on a map along with the locations of our known sex registrants in that neighborhood. We were able to pull a couple of photos from the file and get an immediate ID."

It's also used by watch commanders to do better shift preparation and adjust beat boundaries and staffing to cover hot spots with the highest levels of activities. "Crime could care less about our beats," Bueermann said. "So we adjust our personnel to match activity levels. It's like calling in an air strike. You're directing your limited resources to a targeted area."

Another use is pinpointing drug arrests. "We map the location of the arrest and draw a l000 foot radius around our school sites," he said. "When something occurs three or four blocks away from a school, it's not always clear whether it's within the drug free zone radius. If it is, we tell the district attorney and it can be used for tougher sentencing." Redlands also uses the system to augment visibility with citizen volunteer patrols (CVPs). "We map the highest concentration of calls for service for every new CVP shift and give them the maps," Bueermann said. "We tell them that if they're not at the scene of an accident, they need to be patrolling these areas."

The Department will eventually have CrimeView on every administrator's desk, he predicts. "I'd like to expand it into the squad room and on laptop computers in patrol cars." He plans to train student interns and community volunteers with basic computer skills to generate non confidential reports. Once confidentiality issues are worked out, he sees a time when local citizens could use the system to query crime statistics in their neighborhood.

This is a big change from the "old days" of crime analysis, according to Bueermann. "I've talked with departments that have spent big money on a customized GIG that's collecting dust because only one person was trained to run it," he said. "The way most departments work, only one analyst is really current on the software and he or she ends up generating all the reports. If you need something at night or on weekends, you're usually out of luck. And if the analyst goes on vacation or resigns, that product investment is obsolete." "We've heard the same thing," agreed Milan Mueller, whose company, The Omega Group, created CrimeView. Omega has helped dozens of public safety departments set up GIS systems. "The biggest complaint is that GIS takes too much computer expertise," Mueller said.

This prompted Omega to focus on creating a GIS product that wouldn't rely on in depth technical knowledge. He developed a set of tools that would allow departments to maximize the data they had been collecting and storing away. It was simple enough to be used across the department, potentially even in patrol cars, and be capable of producing tangible results quickly.

Keeping costs low was another criteria. Omega designers wanted a product that smaller and medium-sized public safety departments could buy for between $10,000 and $20,000. With that tall order in mind, they shopped around for the right combination of software that would offer high-powered analytical capabilities and outstanding report generation. The answer was a combination of ArcView GIS (from ESRI) and R&R Report Writer.

"We chose ArcView GIS because of its sophisticated analysis tools that can be customized for police," Mueller said. "Crime View provides officers and administrative personnel access to these capabilities without the long learning curve currently associated with other GIS systems."

Omega will add functionality to CrimeView in coming months and years. Version 2.0, which is currently under development, will include accepted trend analysis and crime forecasting methodologies.

Omega is working with experts in the field, including crime analyst Steve Gottlieb, executive director of the Alpha Group Center for Crime and Intelligence Analysis Training and author of Crime Analysis: From First Report to Final Arrest. "Adding GIS to the tools of the crime analyst will greatly enhance our capabilities," Gottlieb said. "As we reference in our crime analysis training courses, CrimeView better enables us to forecast when and where criminals are likely to strike again."

It also allows agencies to deploy officers with much greater precision and thus heightens their officers' apprehension and suppression efforts, Gottlieb said. "By combining sophisticated technology within an easy to use program, CrimeView brings a new dimension of effectiveness and efficiency to both patrol and investigative operations," he added. Nearly a dozen police departments in California and others across the country are finding that geographic visualization and hands on data analysis are powerful tools in the fight against crime. L&O