Marc Levesque, Principal
Acadia Research, LLC
South Portland, Maine

GIS for Municipal and County Law Enforcement

The use of GIS applications by law enforcement agencies has been on the rise. Within the past year, it has even reached prime time status by being featured in CBS’ “The District,” a crime drama set in Washington, D.C. While their use in large urban centers has received the most attention, GIS tools are also being used in smaller, more rural settings. This presentation will look at how the police department in a medium size Maine city and the sheriff’s department of a Maine county are applying GIS tools. The focus of this use is not so much on the analysis of violent or serial crimes but rather on daily operational issues, such as realigning patrol sector boundaries based on calls for service volume, adjusting shift staffing using temporal analysis, and building better crime prevention strategies for certain neighborhoods. The presentation will include a discussion on data quality issues and their impact on geocoding calls for service and crime events. The GIS tools used in these projects include ArcView, Spatial Analyst, Network Analyst, and the ArcView extension CrimeView.