South Yorkshire Police has implemented crime mapping technology, saving the force over £50,000 per month through efficiency improvements.

The intranet mapping service (IMS) is based on a geographic information system (GIS) from supplier ESRI (UK) and gives all members of the force access to crime and anti-social behaviour information.

Police analysts produce the latest neighbourhood crime trends and resource allocation data using the Crime Analyst technology, and IMS now gives police officers direct access to the results up to 20 times faster than making a traditional manual request.

‘Previously we had to extract data from repositories such as the Crime Management System and analyse it in Excel to create reports of anti-social behaviour which could take up to an hour. Now it takes a few minutes for an officer to access the information in real-time,’ said Paul Thompson, South Yorkshire Police’s GIS analyst.

‘The advantage is that inspectors don’t have to wait for information as they can turn to IMS and look at what happened on their beat over the past two weeks and plan allocation of resources accordingly.

‘We get around six requests every week. If we refer inspectors to the IMS, it takes them a couple of minutes saving around 40 minutes per request compared to the old method.’

Data is refreshed on the IMS every two weeks inline with National Intelligence Model tasking processes.

Over the next 12 months, the force plans to update software to further expand IMS’s capabilities so users can request, for example, specific time periods of crime information.

‘The current version does not support inspectors inputting their own date parameters and will only reveal the last two weeks of data. Feedback has shown users want to add this facility so they can make comparisons with previous years, for example,’ said Thompson.