City of Irving Police Work Smarter With WebFOCUS LEA

Business Intelligence Helps Police Fight Crime in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area

In the face of a shrinking tax base, the City of Irving started taking measures to reduce crime and expand city services in cost-effective ways. As part of this effort, Police Chief Larry Boyd set out to update several aging information systems with a multi-million dollar investment in new Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) systems and Records Management Systems (RMS) from Tiburon, Inc.

The Records Management System offers comprehensive dispatching and automated data-capture capabilities, enabling the City of Irving to collect a tremendous amount of data. However, the influx of information made it clear that the department also needed a more intuitive way for officers, analysts, and command staff to search the database and create timely reports. Led by Chief Boyd, the City decided to deploy a business intelligence (BI) environment that would allow the force to rapidly obtain relevant insight about people, places, things, events, or other issues in a cohesive and understandable way.

The city chose the WebFOCUS BI platform from Information Builders to give officers at headquarters and in the field access to vital data contained in several disparate city and police databases. By creating a central business intelligence environment, the city has been able to gather the knowledge it needs to take a more proactive approach to law enforcement, and combat crime more effectively. 

Finding a Partner in Information Builders

When the city’s IT team set out to select software for their new business intelligence initiative, they had very specific requirements in mind.

“We wanted a one-stop option for gathering information, with everything we needed in one place,” says Terry Gierling, senior crime analyst for the City of Irving Police Department. “It had to be intuitive and offer drill-down capabilities, and it had to access and correlate data from dozens of different data sources used within the police department and throughout the city.”

When they saw a demonstration of the Information Builders Law Enforcement Analytics (LEA) solution at a conference, Gierling and his colleagues quickly latched on to its potential. The team liked that the package includes web-based incident reporting, KPI management dashboards, and interactive-mapping capabilities, as well as predictive analytics and data mining to spot trends about future outcomes.

After narrowing down the list of BI vendors to Information Builders and Cognos, they selected Information Builders because the pre-sales team was able to provide real-world examples of how the software had improved business intelligence for other local police departments.

“We admired how the WebFOCUS platform could combine a variety of different types of data without requiring us to query several different systems,” says Gierling. “Information Builders, demonstrated exactly how they could do it in a live demo. We saw that WebFOCUS was a strong, flexible tool that would let us hit the ground running with our BI initiatives.”

Working Together on the BI Beat

The City of Irving Police Department worked with Information Builders Professional Services to integrate criminal justice data from its existing CAD, RMS, and JMS information repositories, then went on to create dashboards, reports, alerts, ad hoc analytics and interactive maps.

“Information Builders’ tools are very flexible. They can extract data from different types of databases and applications, drawing them into one common, user-friendly database,” Chief Boyd explains. “Information Builders’ ability to deliver a solution in a relatively short time-frame was critical to the success of the project.”

The team also created an information-sharing portal to aggregate criminal information for dissemination to police officers at headquarters, as well as directly to mobile computers in the squad cars. The new analytic environment leverages information from the courts and other city databases as well. Officers can customize the interface to suit their individual needs. Senior officers and supervisors use the dashboard to review key performance indicators (KPIs). Chief Boyd and his supervisors can ensure the department is running smoothly with one quick glance every time they sign in.

“With the Law Enforement Analytics dashboard I can see visually if there’s an aggregation of crimes in a certain area, along with summaries of the types of calls we are responding to, the type of offenses that have been reported, and the top ten categories of calls,” says Chief Boyd. “I can see the big issues at a glance, then drill down into the details as necessary.”

From the daily crime summary, he can access a pin map that displays all crimes reported in the last 24 hours. The left column shows the particular details of each crime and allows him to drill down for specific information.

Meanwhile, patrol officers can access daily crime summaries displayed either in graphical reports or digital maps, along with crime analysis tools, trending tools, and a search engine for querying the system by person, vehicle, location, and other variables. They can see crime stats within their beats for the last 24 hours. Moving the cursor over geographic data points on the interactive maps brings up relevant records. They can also run simple queries. By specifying date parameters and beat parameters, they can see aggregated data and trends, like high incidences of burglaries in certain areas or during certain time periods.

Previously officers would have to issue special requests for these types of reports and sometimes wait weeks for the results.

“Officers can now just go into the map interface, select a particular offense, and submit a query that will instantly launch four other reports to show everything about a case, from suspect information to relevant hyperlinks in the public safety system, officer information, the time of day and who has been contacted in relation to that crime,” says Gierling.

Fighting Crime With Real-Time Intelligence

Some investigators set up their own alerts in the Law Enforcement Analytics system. For instance, if they are investigating a particular type of crime and a similar crime takes place in a designated area or timeframe – or involving a particular vehicle, suspect, complainant, or witness – then they will be automatically notified.

Similarly, based on past criminal activity, incident reports, and variables like weather, moon cycles, school holidays, or special events, the command staff can also see what kinds of crimes are more likely to occur in a particular area. For example, by mapping gunshot incidents from previous years’ incident data, command staff can instantly see, on a map, where most of these calls may come from and can station a patrol in the area to disrupt the activity. One department was able to cut overtime by 60 percent, while decreasing gunshot incidents by 80 percent.

The city also uses WebFOCUS to push data directly to patrol officers. As soon as they start their shifts they know which suspects have been apprehended or interviewed in their beats, where crimes have occurred, what types of offenses have taken place, where upcoming Crime Watch meetings will be held, and what new intelligence bulletins are available. 

“We use this system to debrief our officers every time they log in,” Chief Boyd explains. “They can drill down as necessary to learn more about what’s new, perhaps to prepare for a meeting or to investigate an incident or suspect.

“WebFOCUS is making everyone more proactive and better informed, improving how the officers can respond to crimes,” adds Chief Boyd. “Anything is possible with the new system. We can select whatever information an officer wants and present it however he or she wants it. That has kept us creative as we try to find the easiest, most intuitive formats for presenting data.”