Erlanger, Ky., police mash together search, BI and mapping

By combining business intelligence and two foundations of Web 2.0 -- search and mapping -- a police department in Kentucky has built a brand-new window into crime. This Web-based BI portal allows patrol officers to enter data -- or even pieces of data such as a few numbers from a license plate -- into a simple search interface and retrieve information from their own databases and those of neighboring towns.

For the past several years, officials in Erlanger, Ky., had been planning a project to consolidate fire and police department communications for more than a dozen communities into Erlanger's communications center. However, the Erlanger Police Department didn't have a way to tap into the records management systems of 19 separate government agencies in order to search and analyze information about suspects, reported incidents, arrests and crimes. And even though Erlanger had been manually mapping crimes based on its own data for three years, the task was time-consuming, and the mapping wasn't available in real time. Moreover, other communities' departments hadn't done any crime mapping, says Marc Fields, Erlanger's chief of police.

One search product was able to search Erlanger's own records management system, but it couldn't search the systems operated by the other agencies. It also didn't provide BI analysis or meet the mapping requirements for the project.

After failing to find a single product to automate the entire crime mapping and analysis process, Fields and his colleagues accepted an offer from the local planning department to use its tools: Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. (ESRI) geomapping tools and WebFocus BI software from Information Builders Inc.

Sign up for ITworld's Daily newsletter
Follow ITworld on Twitter @IT_world

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine