In October of 1995, the Salinas Police Department received a grant to implement an innovative problem solving program to combat Youth Firearms Violence. The grant, administered through the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), allowed the City of Salinas and the Police Department to build a mapping and analysis application using GIS technologies. The City of Salinas had been capturing all police report information in its City Database since 1982. This information was used to form the foundation of the information searched and spatially displayed. The City of Salinas, Information Systems Department, along with the software developer, Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), of Redlands, California, worked for several months developing the application that is now in use by Salinas police officers. The base of the system is a Sun Sparc 20 server running ESRI’s ARC INFO software. Three police GIS workstations are networked to various locations in the police building.
An application was developed by ESRI in Visual Basic which allows the officers to build queries in an interactive format. These queries are then automatically sent to ArcView for the actual searches. Additional tools were built into ArcView to make viewing, retrieving and printing data easier.
Training on the police application was given to the entire sworn force by the project manager for ESRI. The three workstations were put into place at the police department on May 13, 1996. The officers have been using the system ever since.
Below are some screen shots from the user interface. The user screens include the ability to search within a distance of a certain location, police beat or "gang territory," "special district" and schools. The officers can narrow the search by date, time and day of week. For searches with multiple perimeters lists are given from which the officers pick form to insure that the query is written in the correct format.
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The Salinas Police Department is researching additional items for the GIS project. They can be divided into two categories. Tools to enhance the current GIS application and items to further expand it’s use. Some ideas follow:
Tools to enhance and expand the Police GIS Application: ¨ Use geo-statistics to predict future hot spots of criminal and gang activity ¨ Building probability maps based on distribution and dot density techniques ¨ Beat boundary distribution based on calls for service, workload, demographics, natural barriers, etc. ¨ Linking street level maps with parcel maps and photographic images and building footprints ¨ 3-d rendering areas ¨ Incorporate our video mug shot system into GIS ¨ Apply Digital Camera technology to place photographic images of locations into GIS (gang hangouts, graffiti, layouts of homes from search warrants, etc.) ¨ Adding the capability of searching the CAD data through GIS
The incorporation of Mobile Computer Terminals with GIS: ¨ Move from a network and workstation environment to a geo server environment to allow geo-queries take place on the server with the images being sent to the MCT’s. Via the same infrastructure that is in place for CAD
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