2024 SAG Award Winners

Criminal Intelligence Service Austria

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Project Goal

The overarching goal of the "Crime Atlas Austria" project was to develop a web application that would enable every police officer in Austria to display and analyze geographical distributions and key areas of criminal activity in an intuitive way and with just a few clicks.
The crime atlas consists of several components, including interactive web maps that display criminal offenses and other data relevant to law enforcement geographically. The Austria-wide crime database can be searched using various filters for geographical (by province, district, or town) or content-related (by offense, modus operandi, location, etc.) issues. The queries can be visualized directly in a map application, and detailed information on individual offenses can be displayed using pop-ups.
This tool is available to over 30,000 police officers and can be used for management, planning, patrols, operations, and targeted prevention work.
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Business Problem Solved

Prior to this project, police officers in Austria did not have access to a high-performance web application that provided an up-to-date geographical overview of localized crimes in an informative manner. The application includes infographics and interactive displays, making it the first innovative crime mapping solution in the Austrian police sector. The data is retrieved from the internal crime database hourly, providing users with the current crime situation 24/7, notably because the application is fail-safe.
The various map applications address a wide range of users: from police officers to investigators and analysts, as well as managers, with different levels of technical knowledge and different demands on the depth of analyses and filtering/queries to be performed.
The crime atlas's numerous functionalities, including filters, queries, and the ability to add and visualize operational data, allow for versatile use in daily work.

Technology Implemented

The crime atlas consists of several ESRI components in a Portal for ArcGIS environment. The landing page was created using ArcGIS Experience Builder,while the individual thematic maps consist of ArcGIS Dashboards and ArcGIS Web AppBuilder application. All applications were designed exclusively with out-of-the-box tools from ESRI.
The main maps of the Crime Atlas are the thematic maps "Crime Maps", which were created with ArcGIS Web AppBuilder in the Dashboard Theme. In addition to standard widgets such as "Navigate","Charts" and "Infographic",the applications also include the "Filter" and "Near Me" widgets,which turn the applications into analysis tools.
Furthermore a digital manual,which was created by using story maps,helps inexperienced users to become familiar with all the implemented features.
Thanks to the new and innovative capabilities of ESRI applications, all ArcGIS Web AppBuilder applications in the Crime Atlas will soon be replaced by ArcGIS Experience Builder applicatio

Development Team Biography

The sub-department of Spatial Crime Analysis is since 2017 part of the Criminal Intelligence Service Austria. The team consists of seven analysts with diverse backgrounds, ranging from a former police officer to long experienced civil servants to colleagues with different academic backgrounds (Geography, Geoinformation Science and Psychology).