Police and Law Enforcement Authorities

GIS & RS techniques employ by police force in variety of applications, containing crime analysis. Criminal intelligence, public information and crime prevention, community policing tasks can done with GIS help. GIS has immense potential to help the police in crime analysis, workforce management, prison and parole management and providing quicker response where it is most needed. Mapping solutions are allowing law enforcement authorities to add context, timing and location data to raw data. This is leading to the creation of rich, interactive maps that is helping officials gain actionable insights. Police agencies worldwide are using geospatial technologies for mapping crime, identifying crime hot spots, assigning officers, and profiling offenders. Spatial analysis is giving geographical context to real world incidents and helping police officials to create geographical profiling of offenders. GIS tools by providing hot spot generation, zonation, navigation and mobile location identification are enabling the Intelligence community to be smarter, faster and hit right at the spot at the right time.

Crime can be predicted through story mapping and trail identification, incident maps and heat maps can help in reducing the possibilities of incident recurrence. By analyzing cell phone data patterns and linking with geo-locations, locations that draw crime can be identified and resource deployment can be done accordingly. This invariably leads to prevention of crime. Predictive policing is achieved through using geospatial technologies and analytical techniques to identify the most probable areas for urgent police intervention. This helps in preventing the occurrence of crimes at the very outset. Location intelligence can help law enforcement detect patterns of crime and take actions to prevent them from occurring.

GIS aids the law enforcement authorities manage their workforce better. GIS helps them in planning field visits for general supervision, crime investigation visits, route optimization, route tracking of the concerned officers, work scheduling, police vehicle tracking, real-time tracking of the location of the force, attendance management, Human Resource Management, asset management, reporting.
The value of GIS for police and policing as, a partner for field officers, a crime investigation and prevention tool, a policy implementation and evaluation tool, a police force planning tool, a tool for testing crime theories, and a communication tool.