ESRI Canada announced that the Ottawa Police Service has selected Crime Analyst for ArcGIS as part of a pilot project that will assist the Police Service in supporting advanced crime analysis.

The Ottawa Police Service is very proactive in the area of Community Oriented Policing and have been looking for a way to more effectively mine the vast amounts of data they produce to support proactive law enforcement.  The Ottawa Police Service is quite familiar with GIS and has been leveraging it successfully to conduct every day operations from deploying front line officers to supporting analytical work that effectively makes their community a safer place.

"Our decision to assess this advanced GIS-based solution came in recognition of the technology’s ability to integrate complex datasets and create highly accurate and intelligence-led crime maps to support policing operations," said Rob Conlin, Senior Systems Analyst, Ottawa Police Service. "There is no doubt that GIS has a significant place in police operations and we have found that the Crime Analyst extension for ArcGIS extends the power of our mission critical applications."

"Crime Analyst for ArcGIS provides us with the ability to deliver strategic, tactical, temporal, and spatial analysis for accurate and evidence based operational support," said Kevin Mason, Manager, Problem Crime Analysis Unit, Ottawa Police Service. "We have found that the extension creates a structured GIS workflow model for our Crime Analysts, which has contributed significantly towards reducing the amount of time spent on victim-offender profiling and comparative case analysis."

Crime Analyst for ArcGIS is a specialized extension for ESRI’s ArcGIS Desktop products. It is designed to provide advanced tools that law enforcement professionals need to fully understand and make sense of their data. Trends in criminal behavior can be assessed and visualized through a range of advanced spatial analysis techniques including spatial modeling and temporal investigation.