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Back to SAG Winners 2004
City and County of San Francisco
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Project Goal
The City and County of San Francisco’s Police Department (SFPD) have recently enhanced their abilities to fight crime with the development of CrimeMAPS (Crime Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety), the city’s first technology-based crime mapping system. CrimeMAPS, which is built upon existing Enterprise GIS technology currently utilized for citywide business processes, provides police officers, public safety officials, and the public, with varying degrees of location-based crime information in near real time. Funded by a 1.5M grant from the Department of Justice’s COPSmore program, this effort began in the summer of 2002, with components coming on-line in November of 2003. Some CrimeMAPS highlights:
• CrimeMAPS allows for more rigorous analysis and accountability for specific incidents - such as homicides, rapes, burglaries, domestic violence, etc. By spatially-enabling criminal justice information for San Francisco, the ability of police officers to analyze, respond, and coordinate criminal response efforts has increased dramatically. In particular, a purse-snatching ring was uncovered in July 2004 thru the use of CrimeMAPS.
• Allows for appropriate re-allocation of resources to prioritized areas. By enabling police and other public safety officials to view dynamic and historical crime patterns, better re-allocation of resources is now possible.
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Business Problem Solved
San Francisco police and public safety officials have previously had little ability to view or analyze crime information, with virtually no ability to review information based on its’ location. Many of the City’s existing legacy public safety systems have provided little integration with other systems, are not built upon relational database technology, and, in general, have been difficult to mine for information. The CrimeMAPS program provides several enhanced functions to officers in their crime fighting duties:
• Enables the leveraging of enterprise public safety data sets, by pulling crime incident information from common public safety data warehouse servers. CrimeMAPS is the first San Francisco public safety system to leverage this new decentralized data model for San Francisco;
• Enhances incident data by combining it with other location-based data that may have a correlation;
• Provides security measures which ensure the safekeeping of critical datasets; and
• In general, increases the efficiency and productivity of police and public safety officials, as they deal with crime prevention and community policing.
Technology Implemented
CrimeMAPS is composed of several database, application, and web servers, all housed at a secure data center in downtown San Francisco. On a daily basis, reported incidents and calls for service are dynamically geocoded and uploaded to CrimeMAPS servers from SFPD RMS and E911 systems. Using map services, as well as Citrix metaframe technology, this data is provided to officers 24/7 thru both a web interface, as well as a local ArcGIS client thru Citrix.
From a technical perspective, CrimeMAPS leverages some key advances:
• Use of a shared storage architecture. CrimeMAPS utilizes Storage Area Network (SAN) technology to share and manage all crime-related information together. Use of this approach not only alleviates personnel resources for storage management – it also creates an environment where backup and recovery are easier and more dynamic to implement.
• Use of clustered database servers for high availability/uptime. The CrimeMAPS architecture focuses on the use of clustered database and application servers to provide redundancy in terms of data and application support.
• Implementation of multiple ways of crime analysis. CrimeMAPS provides two key ways of accessing dynamic crime information: via a web browser, or by a client. Due to the limited bandwidth capacity throughout the SFPD network – Citrix Technology was implemented to facilitate a heavy client over thin bandwidth.
• CrimeMAPS has some unique functions programmatically – such as the use of oblique-angled photography with crime data; incorporation of advanced crime analysis techniques, such as hotspot and cluster analysis - as well as dynamically geocoding incidents as they occur for daily review.
Development Team Biography
San Francisco’s CrimeMAPS technology team is comprised of several individuals:
-Erich Seamon, Geographic Information Officer
-Sam Kwong, CrimeMAPS Project Manager
-Jeff Johnson, Senior GIS Applications Developer
-Ellen Carney, Senior GIS Programmer/Analyst
-Vince Ulfig, Senior GIS Programmer/Analyst
-Richard Isen, Senior GIS Applications Developer
-Lt. Tom Bruton (Retired) San Francisco Police Department
-Sgt. Tom Feledy, San Francisco Police Department COMPSTAT Unit
-Cynthia Caporizzo, SF Mayor’s Office (currently US Attorney’s Office – SF)
-Jeremy Duval, The Omega Group
-Eric Apple, ESRI
Erich Seamon is the Geographic Information Officer for the City and County of San Francisco. Mr. Seamon has worked over the past 10 years for a variety of government and private sector organizations – with a continued focus on advanced uses of geographic information technologies. With a M.S. from Bowling Green State University in Geological Sciences/GIS, Mr. Seamon brings a diversified technology and hard science background to the table. In his current role as head of the City and County of San Francisco’s GIS initiatives, much of his recent work has been focused on leading large-scale technology projects that cross functional and governmental lines – including crime analysis, economic development, and homeland security.
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