Fighting Crime With Business Intelligence
Commentary by Inspector Phil Challinor, Staffordshire Police
Police forces in Great Britain increasingly rely heavily on information technology to fight crime. So does Staffordshire Police, whose 2,290 police officers, 1,300 civilian support staff, and 10 operational Divisions serve over a million people in the County of Staffordshire, including centers such as Stoke-on-Trent, Lichfield, and Stafford. In 1997/98, the area reported over 88,000 crimes.
To monitor its operations, Staffordshire Police uses a series of custom-made applications including Crime Recording, Custody Recording, File Preparation, Courts Administration, and an Intelligence System. All software is based on Ingres relational database technology and runs on 30 Bull DPX/2 UNIX platforms for over 400 users.
The original system limited users in making free-ranging queries through its character-based terminals. In 1994, IT professionals at Staffordshire Police solved the problem by deploying an application that could access all the Ingres databases. That tool was Hummingbird BI/Query, the query and reporting component of BI/Suite, Hummingbird’s integrated business intelligence solution for the enterprise.
“BI/Query was by far the easiest of the reporting tools to use, and we received excellent support from Hummingbird,” says Inspector Phil Challinor.
Initially used by a handful of people, BI/Query was recently deployed across the force. Over the previous four years, says Challinor, reports from the legacy IT systems had become less useful because, for example, simple searches to identify the owners of recovered property meant sifting through mass amounts of irrelevant data. A more precise approach was needed.
Challinor knew a small number of criminals were committing most of the crime, and that more detailed analysis of data would reveal information about offenders and lead to their eventual prosecution. He also knew that operational and financial constraints meant any new reporting solution would have to protect the existing IT investment. Because it was already in use, BI/Query was seen as the most cost-effective answer.
The new solution was implemented in phases that included the creation of standard formats for data entry, enhancing Home Office crime codes, and developing BI/Query data models and reports with a user-friendly front-end. Functions covered general queries, property queries, statistical searches, crime profiling queries, and prolific-offender queries by Division. More complex queries could be run at police headquarters. The new solution was widely deployed in early 1998.
“It was very easy to use. A user answered some simple questions when prompted, and BI/Query presented the data in a format that they could chart or map. Users could also filter the results, something they couldn’t do with the old applications.”
Attention then turned to mapping. Staffordshire Police were already users of Caliper Corporation’s Maptitude, an entry-level computerized mapping and spatial analysis system. Thanks to “excellent support” from Hummingbird and Maptitude supplier SSI Systems and Solutions, police officers were soon able to mine their crime data and map the results.
Known as the Crime and Offender Mapping Evaluation Tool (COMET), this powerful combination has brought a number of significant benefits because crime information presented in a tabular, graphical, or geographical form is more readily understood than long lists of numbers.
Time savings are significant. Manual research into an offense used to take days or weeks, depending on the type of analysis and cross-checking required. Officers can now check a hunch within 20 minutes and then quickly apprehend the right individual. For example, officers using COMET developed a crime pattern for a prolific juvenile offender who was later arrested.
“BI/Query is a very cost-effective reporting tool and fits in well with today’s policing methods. It allows us to track emerging trends and to be far more proactive.”
Further developments are planned. BI/Analyze is being used to give a multidimensional view of data, and the force plans to combine data from multiple Divisional databases to provide officers with a big-picture view of crime occurring within the force’s jurisdiction. Challinor believes its investment in technology makes Staffordshire Police “more advanced than most” in its analysis of crime data. That’s good news for Staffordshire’s citizens—and bad news for its criminals.