January 22, 2008

Portland, Oregon, Police Improve Incident Tracking and Public Information Sharing Using ArcGIS

Highway Mapping Project and CrimeMapper Web Site Give Department the Geographic Advantage in Fighting Crime

Redlands, California—The Portland, Oregon, Police Department recently extended its GIS services internally as well as externally to the public. The agency enhanced its records management database with spatially enabled highway data that improves how it tracks incidents along its major highways. In addition, its public Web site has been improved with even greater functionality and ease of use to share a rich array of crime data with the public.

"Police officers are extremely visual people, and for a lot of the requests, tables and statistical data are sufficient, but when you plot it on a map, it really comes to life," says Christy Khalifa, crime analyst, Portland Police Department, Strategic Services Division. "They’re used to dealing with specific areas of the city, and that’s the kind of information they need: GIS-based analysis and maps such as a crime hot spot or trend. That’s how effective decisions are made. We’re also a department that’s really driven by the public. So supporting the public’s informational needs with online mapping helps us communicate where crime is taking place and how we’re making decisions and matching our efforts with their expectations."

Portland Police Department Gets GIS Savvy in New Ways
The department’s GIS group used ESRI’s ArcGIS 9 software platform to help track street-related incidents and violations. Known as the Portland Police Department's Freeway Mapping Project, the application captures and makes available spatial and related incident data of offenses occurring on the city of Portland’s major freeways. This incident data helps the department more accurately track crime along its major highways to provide commanders and field personnel with better information. The improved system has received stellar responses from the many different information stakeholders including the chief of police.

"Being able to look at crime data by location has always been an important capability for the department," says Rosanne M. Sizer, chief of police, Portland Police Department. "Locating crime data occurring on a freeway has not been possible previously. This problem has been resolved through the extraordinary efforts of our GIS team. PPDS [Portland Police Data System] can now support identifying crime locations on our freeways and highways by precinct, district, and grid."

CrimeMapper Web Site Makes Data Just a Point and Click Away
Another substantial success within the department is its CrimeMapper public Web site, which provides the ability to map and track crimes reported to the Portland police. The Web site is updated monthly using data supplied from PPDS.

Citizens can search CrimeMapper by using a street address or intersection. They can pan and zoom on a digital map of the city of Portland to see what’s happening in their area of interest by accessing 28 different crime categories for query. They can locate crime or a series of crimes by streets, blocks, neighborhoods, and precincts. They can also track and view crime data by time of day or day of the week or by a time parameter such as a week or month.

New crime categories accessible via the Web site include Simple Assault, Forgery, Fraud, Embezzlement, Stolen Property, Vandalism, Weapon Laws, Prostitution, Sex Crimes, Drug Laws, Gambling, Family Offenses, and more.

A new e-mail notification feature has also been added so citizens can automatically receive a monthly e-mail containing a summary of crimes that have occurred around a specific address or location within the city.

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Jesse Theodore, ESRI
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