Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Source of success

I've been contacted in the past week by The Spokane Police Department, the Lexington Police Department, the St.Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the New Jersey State Police. These agencies are seeking information about our police information systems. Three of the four were particularly interested in our use of CrimeView Dashboard, a GIS-centric analysis and visualization product from the Omega Group.

While the software these agencies inquired about is great, it is the quality and quantity of data behind it that allows us to be so successful with CrimeView and our other information resources. That is a product of thirty years of development by our own IT staff, especially Mr. Clair Lindquist, who has put Lincoln in the position so envied by other cities.

4 comments:

Joe Twelvepack said...

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Aside from incident reports written by beat officers, what are the main sources of crime data?

Does the federal government require PDs to do a lot of data reporting? Lord knows the schools have little time for anything else.

Tom Casady said...

Joe 12,

That's it. We also have dispatch data, but the Incident Report data is a more accurate reflection of reported crime than the dispatch records.

The Federal government doesn't really require anything. Like most police departments, we report certain crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting program, but this is not mandatory.

Anonymous said...

Director,
The records of Defensive Gun use by citizens is one statistic that is very unreliable. I know several people, myself included, that have displayed a firearm to stop a crime. I did not call a Police Dispatcher to report this. I suspect very few people do. Unless the trigger is actually pulled situations like this are rarely reported. I would bet several others that read your Blog have faced similar situations. BTW just for the record I never had to do this in Lincoln.

Gun Nut

-JS- said...

Ah yes, Mr. Lindquist. At a time of budget cuts and cost savings, let me submit a necessary expenditure: an armed security detail and a Mercedes Guardian for Mr. Lindquist.

Just a thought....