The Crimeview Dashboard is featured in the September 2011 issue of Law Officer Magazine.
Colleges and Universities Comply with Clery Act Using CrimeMapping.com
By Eugene Mueller
A critical consideration for most parents preparing to send their children to college is the degree of public safety on and around campus. Parents are scrutinizing the crime and disorder statistics of prospective schools as part of their selection criteria. Federal law requiring this information to be made readily available and accessible backs up the concerns of parents regarding public safety records of colleges and universities.
Trending Toward Transparency
By Talal “Trip” Albagdadi
There is no doubt that technology continues to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us and directly impacts each of our lives. Facebook and Twitter have been credited with pushing the world towards a more transparent future. This move towards transparency is very evident in the US law enforcement community. Attitudes toward public crime mapping have shifted dramatically over the course of the last two years. Sharing crime data with the public is not a new phenomenon but the scale and scope of what’s happening now is unparalleled.
Chesapeake Police Leverage Technology with CRIMEVIEW® Dashboard
Today’s law enforcement agencies face challenges well beyond just fighting crime or responding to emergencies. Most police and sheriff’s departments are overrun with data from multiple sources. Making sense of it all is a daunting task but necessary in fulfilling the needs of each community.
The Chesapeake Police Department in Virginia understands the value of leveraging technology as a force multiplier and recently implemented CrimeView® Dashboard in an effort to better serve their community. CrimeView® Dashboard is a cloud-based solution that enables the entire agency to access an instant overview of current crime activity in the form of maps, charts and reports through a Web browser. Chief Kelvin Wright states that “Chesapeake intends to use CrimeView® Dashboard at all levels in the department. Be it Patrol Operations, Investigations or management, we believe that this tool will help make us more efficient and effective in delivering law enforcement services.”
CRIMEMAPPING.com Goes Mobile!
August 15, 2011
The Omega Group is extremely proud to announce the release of our CrimeMapping.com Mobile application for the iPhone platform. This FREE download represents the culmination of our efforts to bring the public a very high level of data integrity and accuracy in a very simple, intuitive format. Creating more self-reliance among community members is a great benefit to community oriented policing efforts everywhere and has been proven effective in combating crime. Our CrimeMapping.com Mobile application will empower the public through helping to promote transparency and trust between the police and the communities they serve.
Duluth Police Implement Landlord Notification Program
Chief Gordon Ramsay interviewed by Eugene Mueller
Communities with significant numbers of residential rental units and other non-owner occupied multi-unit housing are familiar with the fact that these locations are the source of frequent repeat calls to law enforcement to deal with a wide variety of criminal disturbances. For the City of Duluth, its stock of approximately sixteen thousand rental dwelling units translates into 40,000 to 50,000 calls for police service annually. This volume of calls requires direct landlord involvement to mitigate the inordinate demand for police response.
The Duluth Police implemented the Landlord Notification Program earlier this year in order to provide e-mail alerts to landlords of reported crime incidents at their properties so that they could take steps to prevent recurrences. This automated internal system is an adaptation of the Duluth Police’s CrimeView®, a crime analysis technology information service provided by The Omega Group.
CrimeView® tracks crime incidents geographically by directly linking to crime incident data from the department’s records system and presenting the incidents visually as icons on a map of the city to be viewed on a personal computer or portable communication device. CrimeView® sends e-mail alerts to property owners displaying the location and summary description of crime incidents at their properties when calls for service exceed the police department’s designated minimum threshold. Since the system identifies the exact address of the location, the department has taken careful steps to limit the release of this information only to landlords.
Dashboards Help Lift the ‘Fog of Crime’
By Chief Bence Hoyle
Carl Von Clausewitz, a Prussian military officer in the 1800s, coined the term “fog of war”, which described the state of confusion, unknowing or otherwise general lack of information about the enemy, his whereabouts and other factors influencing a successful outcome during battle. In law enforcement a similar environment exists relating to crime, the criminals that commit them and the information-led policing strategies designed to achieve measurable outcomes in key mission areas such as crime response, reduction and prevention. The ability to draw a direct ‘line-of-sight’ between strategic objectives and tactical action is often ‘lost in the fog!’
The introduction of advanced law enforcement communications and information systems over the past fifty years, while intending to improve police operations, has had the unintended consequence of creating “information overload.” The information generated across the myriad of disparate policing systems that support strategic planning, tactical operations, decision support, performance management and administrative functions within the modern police department is disjointed. Interpreting this information and making it actionable across all levels of the agency is a daunting task.
The Law Enforcement Dashboard Emerges
Information dashboards are not new phenomena. They have been available in the form of business intelligence solutions for Fortune 500 corporations for many decades. What is new is the recent emergence of a distinct class of Law Enforcement Information Dashboards (LEIDs) that enable police departments to see through or lift the ‘fog of crime.’ These LEIDs specifically address the unique requirements that the business of crime fighting demands.
The goal of these dashboard solutions is to provide law enforcement personnel with a consolidated, single screen, visual display of critical information required to make timely and effective decisions. Each of these LEID’s are customizable for the specific needs of first-line patrol operations, supervisory and command level interests, as well as task force operations where a particular type of information may be needed.
In a world of complex and diverse real-time streaming data, how does an agency efficiently extract the specific data that is helpful in making decisions that truly effect operational outcomes? Through various reporting requirements, both mandatory and voluntary, law enforcement agencies have become experts at data collection. However, they are desperate for tools that can translate this data into instant, at-a-glance, operational intelligence that can lead to responsive and focused strategic deployment of assets and tactical strategies. Information dashboards have the potential to meet this challenge!
This whitepaper explores eight key LEID requirements and outlines a recommended set of dashboard functionality that best addresses the needs of the modern police enterprise.
