January 31, 2023 |
December 17, 2024
The acid thieves were bound to hit Vienna. Austrian law enforcement had been on the lookout for this trend. Although Austria’s violent crime rate is low, property crimes persist.
The acid thieves don’t steal acid. Over the past few years in several European cities, burglars have gained access to buildings by using nitric acid to melt door locks. When thieves tried this tactic to Vienna, the burglary popped up on a map shared by law enforcement agencies across Austria.
Mapping crime is not a new idea. We’ve all seen detailed crime maps covered with pushpins in TV shows and movies.
Now, digital crime maps are answering questions like, could the five thieves charged with 90 acid burglaries in Paris be part of a larger group?
Authorities are not sure, yet. But in Austria, police have a map-based visualization tool and cross-jurisdictional data sharing for location intelligence. What’s known as Crime Atlas Austria uses an enterprise geographic information system (GIS) to map all crimes committed anywhere in the nation’s nine federated states. Whenever a new crime is reported to the police, the data is added to the Crime Atlas within one hour, making it available to the rest of the agency.
The atlas, maintained by Criminal Intelligence Service Austria (Bundeskriminalamt or BK), the nation’s central police agency, has been online for two years. Historical crime data within the map helps police understand long-term trends. The visualization of current crime data helps them identify developing crime hot spots and see hidden relationships in the data.
“The Crime Atlas really has a specific purpose,” said Jacques Huberty, BK’s head of spatial analysis. “It should support investigations, and it should support prevention.”
Every day, federal and local police find constructive ways to use the Crime Atlas. Last summer, gang violence rocked Vienna when youth gangs with roots in Chechnya battled gangs of Syrians. The map clearly shows these violent crimes being committed in parks and train stations.
Burglaries are perhaps the best way to grasp how the Crime Atlas is changing policing in Austria. Hot spots are quickly identified, especially in this area of crime, and measures such as patrols and prevention can be carried out quickly and in a geographically targeted manner.
Say you want to see where the acid burglaries have occurred. Huberty pulled up the basemap of Austria. “You just type in ‘acid,’” Huberty demonstrated, as a series of dots appeared on the map. “There you have the whole series for all of Austria.”
Beyond acid burglary updates, the atlas was designed to make accurate data accessible to the nation’s 30,000 police and detectives in different police departments.
“We had three criteria,” said Horst Schabauer, a spatial crime analyst at BK. “The first was usability—nobody should need a handbook. The second was that the data had to be good. And the third was that everyone should see everything, all of Austria.”
Everything police do “can be encompassed by this platform,” Huberty added. “The investigators, prevention people, everyone can go to this platform to have all the daily information.”
Complete access to crime data has had important implications for how crimes are investigated in Austria.
Huberty zoomed in on an area that showed where Vienna borders the state of Lower Austria to the south (Vienna is both a city and its own state.). Dots in various colors appeared on the screen, on both sides of the border.
“Those orange dots are car burglaries,” Huberty said. “The different colors symbolize a selection of the most important areas of crime. By this, you can analyze spatial relations between these dots, and you can go back and look at historical cases.”
“It’s important that you can see here there’s quite a close proximity,” added Kira Lappé, another BK spatial crime analyst, as she scanned the screen.
“In the general report management system [that predates the Crime Atlas], the police officers in Vienna could only check on what’s happening there, but not here,” Huberty said, indicating Lower Austria.
For the EGS, an investigative unit of Austria’s federal police that investigates street crimes and property crimes including burglaries, the atlas has altered the entire caseload workflow.
“Every day, they do an analysis with the Crime Atlas, looking for clusters and patterns, and then plan their patrol based on that information,” Huberty said.
“It’s not that they have fewer questions for us, but they can answer the smaller ones on their own,” Lappé said. “Which means they’re coming to us for more in-depth analysis. That’s a real shift.”
As BK analysts study the atlas and use advanced methods to aggregate data, they sometimes make “thematic” maps that are disseminated across police agencies. Lappé pulled up one for burglaries committed during twilight hours, a popular time to strike, particularly in the winter months when it gets darker earlier.
“Here, we can see burglaries from the last three days, over the whole country,” Huberty said.
With a few clicks, some of the burglary spots turned red, signifying a twilight burglary.
“If some patterns persist,” he continued, “it will be added to a hot spot list. We can see the cluster and send out a bulletin saying that burglars might be in this region, so please do some prevention work, but also inform the patrol.” The local police, in turn, can do things to alert residents, such as post notices.
Crime Atlas Austria is very much a living document. Users can import their own data and visualize it in the map. As it continues to accrue daily data, historical patterns emerge. Schabauer also imagines the atlas becoming even more of a personalized tool.
“I’d like to make it more interactive,” he said. “Police often approach us and ask us to have a deeper look at something, to see if it might indicate a series or pattern.”
Schabauer sees the atlas as extending from visualization to support analysis and strategy.
“Police could feed more information into it if they see something that they think might be a phenomenon,” he said. “Our investigation teams could then provide more input about why this crime is happening, and offer measures to tackle the problem.”
Learn more about how law enforcement agencies across the world apply GIS to keep communities safe.
January 31, 2023 |
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