Meridian Awards 2012

Background

The Crime Infomation Analysis (CIA) unit at the Toronto Police Service (TPS) provides service- wide support which impacts on the development of new methods aimed at assisting in reducing the risk of crime to the community. Various initiatives have had a tremendous influence on the types of analytica! products provided to Command Officers, Investigating Officers, Frontline Ofñcers, and City Officials. Our Team takes the lead in ensuring that the TPS is on the forefront of top issues in crime analysis, providing officers with information that can assist in identifying crime patterns and trends, as well as developing required standards. As new analytical techniques emerge and new types of products are delivered at the corporate level, there is a demand for similar types of analysis at the divisional level. CIA is dedicated to building technical solutions to simplify complex mapping techniques for crime analysts. Ongoing development for divisional Crime Analysts is therefore fundamental to keep up with changing business practices.

The Problems

First, in order to visualize crime incidents and other policing data in a mapping environment, locations require corresponding geographical coordinates (geocoding). The vast majority of crime related data contain location information. Our success rate in geocoding subsets of various data sources range from 19% to 75%, due to volumes of records containing open text ñelds for addresses and location information as opposed to structured address fields. This becomes problematic when using such data for quantitative or hotspot analysis, hence such analysis is only performed on select datasets with clean, structured and geocoded records. TPS needed to implement a process of geocoding crime incidents, arrest locations and locations of field investigations.

Secondly, mapping technology can be a complex task for police officers with little experience and training in the use of desktop GIS software. The majority of our crime analysts are sworn police officers. These analysts receive extensive training on not only the use of Mapinfo Professional, but also the practical application of GIS in crime analysis. Investigators and front line officers neither receive any training to perform general crime mapping, nor do they have the availability of any desktop mapping software. TPS needed a means of retrieving crime information through a web based mapping application available throughout the agency via their intranet system.

The Project

In 2008 the TPS engaged in a Geocoding Project and acquired the Envinsa Location Platform to geocode all our historical crime data, from arrest locations, field investigations, reported crime, and home addresses of individuals investigated or arrested. This involved a data scrubbing stage as part ofthe regularly scheduled geocoding process. The second phase of the project was the development of a web based mapping application using Push‘N’See and Mapxtreme as a portal to access all their geocoded data and perform practical crime mapping functionality. The project was recentiy compieted and as a result:

• the hit rate for geocoding now range from 85% to 95%
• new location information from various sources are automatically geocoded on a daily basis
• the web application allows officers to: visualize crime data by type and date range among other attributes
• overlay surrounding business points such as banks, pawnshops, public transit routes, etc.
• generate drive~tlme/drive distance polygons and radius buffers to select data from other sources (ie. retrieve all known sex offenders residing within a 500m of a Missing Child Occurrence)
• perform both single address geocoding and batch geocoding from a .csv file.
• export the mapping layers into a mif/.mid format easily imported into most GIS applications.

With the Push’N'See component the TPS is also achieve to integrate interactive crime maps on the intranet environment which allows officers to view regular weekly crime maps vla their Mobile Work Stations (MWS) in the police cars.

Technologies

This project involved the utilization ofthe following technologies:

• Envinsa Location Platform
• ­MapMarker Geocoding Engine
• Push N See
• MapInfo Professional