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MAPPING & NAVIGATION 23 www.officer.com May 2014 Law Enforcement Technology PRODUCT SHOWCASE Online map: criminal activity Pittsfield (Mass.) Police Department chose BAIR Analytics Inc.'s RAIDS Online to provide the public information on the city's criminal activity. Available from the PD's website, citizens will be able to see icons for various types of crimes based on a selected timeframe and location. RAIDS Online reports up to 27 categories of crime, with a color-coding option for data analyzation. Crimes presented in the map represent ones with an entered written police report. Sex crimes are not included. Circle 19 on Reader Service Card Crime location analysis Developed by Ned Levine & Associates and funded by grants from NIJ, CrimeStat IV (ver- sion 4.0), a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations, provides statistical tools to aid law enforcement agen- cies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts. The program includes more than 100 statistical routines for the spatial analysis of crime and other incidents. CrimeStat inputs incident locations in dbf, point shp or ASCII formats using either spherical or projected coordinates. It calculates various spatial statistics and writes graphical objects to ArcGIS, MapInfo, Surfer for Windows and other GIS packages. Circle 20 on Reader Service Card Sex offender mapping system To assist in child abduction investigations, West Virginia State Police is creating its own GPS coordinate-based sex offender mapping system to allow troopers to quickly and efficiently identify sex offenders within an inquired region. The system will also have the ability to provide locations of known sex offenders within a radius of an entered address. Development of the new system began through a grant from the West Virginia Technical Assistance Broadband Grant Program. The West Virginia State Police have partnered with the West Virginia University through the West Virginia Cyber Crime Cooperative. Access to the database will be restricted to law enforcement only. According to Lt. D.B. Swiger, the system could be utilized for crime analyzation via identifying trends. GPS tech helps arrest 40+ thieves Frustrated by the manpower and resources required to catch bicycle thieves, Charleston (S.C.) Police Department turned to Securus Inc. for a solution to help curb bike theft, save resources and get thieves off the street. After the police force began using locators from Securus Inc., in less than 10 months, officers made more than 40 arrests. The process is also more efficient, as officers track down and arrest thieves in as little as 10 minutes, often catching them red-handed with the stolen bike. The low cost and ease of use of the Securus system has allowed law enforcement to deploy units throughout Charleston and significantly ramp up arrests with very little time and money. Since nearly half of those caught are repeat property thieves, many of the bike thefts turn into felony charges, which carry longer sentences. Circle 17 on Reader Service Card Software takes out guess work Haverhill (Mass.) Police Department has began using PredPol, a crime prediction software based on the cloud. The system bases its analytics on type, location and time. The algorithms present crime predictions on Google maps. Predictions, reportedly more accurate than human analysts, can analyze a narrow 500- by 500-foot square for crimes, including bur- glary, motor vehicle theft, breaking and entering and drug crimes. With this data, law enforcement would be able to identify locations to maximize an officer's efficiency. Personal information from victims, offenders or officers are not collected. Circle 18 on Reader Service Card LET_23_MappingShowcase0514.indd 23 4/18/14 2:13 PM