This is the first in a series of guest blog posts examining the use of GIS in public safety and national security organisations. The author, Gary Birchall, is a subject matter expert (formerly with South Yorkshire Police) and is currently working with Microsoft Partner MapCite in building GIS solutions for the sector. For more information, please see here.
Introduction
This narrative is a personal journey that focuses upon the acquisition of knowledge and development of GIS within a law enforcement environment (South Yorkshire Police). I always had a passion for the subject of geography and since joining the police service in 1982 I became interested in the part played by the geography of neighbourhoods and how the commission of crimes and incidents in certain locations occurred due to the environmental situations that existed.
I learnt anecdotally from experienced police officers that they knew who were responsible for the offences and where they were happening but they had little knowledge as to what motivated these people, usually male, to offend how they did.
As policing systems were nearly all paper based it was difficult to produce consistently accurate crime pattern analysis, which is the spatial and temporal study of geographic based crime/incident locations, to help the force work towards a corporate method of study of this phenomena.
Not easily impressed
In 2000, some 18 years into my police service, I started a part-time master’s degree in Criminal Intelligence Analysis at the University of Manchester’s Henry Fielding Centre. In the first semester I attended a series of lectures by Dr. Robert Barr who was working in the field of geographic information systems. These lectures were to be the trigger for a career that has continued to this day in the field of GIS and locational intelligence. In short, the work of Dr. Barr, in my case was a revelation.
Dr. Barr and his department were working on systems that would allow disease, health and crime to be modelled geographically and displayed in a contextual setting. As a result of the lectures I wrote an essay which addressed how GIS and geography could influence the work of South Yorkshire Police. My employers already had a nationally approved GIS but clearly it was not on a par with what I had seen at university.
Throughout my three years at University, I continued to consider the relevance of geography to policing and it played an important part in my final thesis which was a case study of a vehicle crime reduction initiative in the south east of Sheffield. One of the key aspects of the work addressed how geography at macro, meso and micro levels influenced the policing of criminals responsible for vehicle crime in localised areas.
The work that had been completed by Dr. Barr, gave me the idea that within South Yorkshire Police geography had a much bigger part to play than was suspected and could be very influential in the way that policing was conducted. The correlation of crime data within the organisation was very rudimentary, as it was in most organisations. The most effective way was to construct pivot tables in Microsoft Excel
My first GIS usage allowed simple maps of crime to be displayed to a wider audience. I researched mainly via the United States Department of Justice’s crime mapping research centre how GIS was being used in law enforcement in America. This led me to think about how geography could be used not only to effectively display crime and incident data but to attempt to find out why it regularly appeared in the same locations.
The driving factor was to attempt to use geography to see if the environment influenced individuals to offend, a question that was unable to be answered some 18 years earlier.
What do you know about GIS?
At this time (2000) I was approached by Dr. Max Craglia (Town Planning), Dr. Young Hoon Kim (Geography) and Dr. Andrew Costello (Criminology) from the University of Sheffield to work with them on a project that would use geography and GIS to analyse police crime data in a simple fashion that could be understood by a wider audience. When these three learned gentlemen planted themselves in my office, little did I know what I was to be involved in. The funding for the project came via a Home Office innovation research grant.
After two years of development work, a piece of software was produced (now licensed to ESRI UK) called the Crime Analyst Toolbox which launched geography into the law enforcement arena within the UK. The toolbox was a series of intuitive buttons that basically handled data stored in Microsoft Excel spread sheets. The buttons allowed data to be hot spotted, repeat victimisation tests to be carried out, aoristic analysis (temporal) on event times to be conducted, the sequencing of data from GPS sources to be mapped, the calculation of routes taken by offenders and other data handling routines. For the first time, South Yorkshire Police had the ability to plot data on varying levels of Ordnance Survey maps with a high degree of accuracy to examine where crimes and calls for assistance were occurring. The greatest advancement of data handling that this product offered was the ability to merge multiple data sets via its data management tool. This allowed a whole host of open source data such as demographic data, ONS output areas, house price data, in short anything that had a geocode somewhere in the variable string of the data. The uses of data became endless within this product environment ranging from policing, fire service, business, flood modelling, counter terrorism to name but a few. South Yorkshire Police had taken the first tentative steps into a whole new world of geographically based data modelling and in 2006 it would lead them and this author to develop a world first, a law enforcement intranet mapping system.
Gary Birchall M.A., C Geog (GIS), F.R.G.S.
About the Author:
Gary has recently retired from South Yorkshire Police officer having served for 30 years working in a wide variety of policing roles. He has substantial experience in the area of intelligence undertaking roles including the mapping of crime and ASB across the county of South Yorkshire and the ability to merge multiple data sets in a GIS environment. He has worked in a variety of intelligence roles including the profiling of bogus officials and prolific offenders. He has extensive knowledge of performance based analysis both statistically and geographically after being responsible for the management and development of performance briefs for the Sheffield command team.
His main professional interests focus around the use of GIS and locational intelligence to both the public and commercial sector. He is involved with Microsoft and their licensed partners in devising locational intelligence software applications on mobile product platforms. He currently advises a Microsoft BizSpark One listed company on the uses of GIS and locational intelligence in a public sector defence and safety environment.
He was an original co-developer of the ‘Crime Analyst Toolbox’, a GIS application for Crime & Intelligence analysts which is now a world-wide product marketed by ESRI UK Ltd. He also developed a training package for this product with a criminological context which was delivered to over 100 analysts.
In 2003 he was awarded a Masters Degree in Criminal Intelligence Analysis at Manchester University, and in 2007 he was awarded a Bramshill Fellowship for Research (NPIA), and made a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society. In 2010 he qualified as a Chartered Geographer and is currently in the final stages of thesis production for a PhD at Sheffield Hallam University (Centre for regional, economic and social research, CRESR).