Can Geomatics Fight Crime?

Is there a case for collecting, storing, and especially cataloguing, detailed data on insects and plant species and water composition to the level that it could help solve crimes? Do you worry about Freedom of Information legislation to the point that you would rather not know than suffer having the information be made public?  Do you follow standards?  Do you find that following standards sound nice, but are a hard sell at the best of times? 

 Every year the Ontario Police College in Aylmer, Ontario, holds a 3-day seminar for municipal and provincial police officers on GIS and Crime.  This topic is increasingly popular and many educational institutions have GIS as a mandatory part of all justice and social services programs. Geographic analysis may not be the most common trick used by the crime solving experts on TV’s CSI, but it is certainly used on a day-to-day basis by real investigators. 

Some of the investigative techniques on television and movies really are used by crime investigators for instance, 3-D crime scene reconstructions showing the trajectory of various weapons, or the sequence of events in traffic accidents.  However, some of the suggested uses, although plausible, are not currently possible.  Often materials found on suspects in crime dramas are identified as coming from a specific location, based on soil or geological or vegetation data.  As you may very well know, the majority of this data is either so general as to be less than useful, or so localized and specific to a single study or a business function that no one outside of a small circle of experts knows that it exists or how to interpret it.  One typical example is the police-based North American database of municipal water chemical composition, which will allow chemical analysis of a strand of hair to determine the approximate geographic location (the difference between Utah and Texas, but not between Chicago and Kansas City) where a subject would have spent the last few weeks.

At the annual conference, police GIS practitioners are shown how various jurisdictions generate statistical reports as maps showing patterns of where and when different types of crimes are committed, and how to look for possible correlations.  Attempts have been made to see whether different building types, land use or density have a relationship with specific types, scales or rates of crime. Do more convenience store robberies happen downtown or in the suburbs; are high-rise apartment buildings less likely than single family homes to be invaded; or are more break-and-enter crimes done by local young people or by out-of-town professionals?  There are also the occasional successes with geographic profiling, like the analysis undertaken of the infamous Washington sniper done by the Canadian, former Detective Inspector Kim Rossmo of Vancouver, BC.

As good as this sounds, there is resistance to such statistical analysis.  I think that it comes largely from fear that the moment any one part of town is deemed to have more criminal activity than another, housing values will drop and residents will refuse to live or work there, causing the area to blight and deteriorate in a snowball effect. This kind of argument is a deductive fallacy.  The real concern often cited is that, under Freedom of Information legislation, simply having such data, means having to give it up on demand.  Some police forces feel that this is a less than valid argument and as a result have attempted to have all work that they do declared secret for purposes of safety and security.  Unfortunately, this can mean tossing out the baby with the bathwater.  Some statistics, like the number and type of traffic accidents that happen at a specific intersection or bend in the road should be shared with the local public works or highway authority to increase public safety.

Interestingly, the most successful aspect of GIS and Criminal Investigation lies with the long-established practice of police forces sharing data about crimes across jurisdictions.  Over many years police forces have learned that standardizing the way crimes are described, and catalogued (read Metadata), allows for effective searching, sorting, ,comparison and ultimately discovery.  Police forces have begun to apply the concept of standards to geographic data collection, and are asking suppliers of geospatial data to standardize as well.  The model they are using is the field of archeology where researchers catalogue their findings in such a way to permit the broader patterns to emerge across individual digs and other investigations.   Geographers solving crimes or predicting the location of an unexcavated ancient city are not the stuff of science fiction; but rather proof that following standards is effective!

Please let me know your thoughts. Take care, and stay well…

Raphael Sussman

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This is not an official Ontario Government website. The thoughts, views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and contributors and are not to be considered as those of the Ontario Government. The official website for Land Information Ontario is ontario.ca/lio.

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