Pitney Bowes Business Insight has launched a new-generation software solution – MapInfo Crime Profiler™ - that introduces new crime analysis efficiencies and capabilities for hard-pressed police forces across the country.

Windsor, 16 April 2009 – In recent years, crime analysis and mapping has become an essential tool for effective law enforcement – not only to aid detection rates, but also to support operational efficiency and effectiveness, management reporting and other enterprise-wide tasks. MapInfo Crime Profiler™ automates much of the statistical legwork that sits behind crime analysis and visualisation, allowing users to perform sophisticated analyses more quickly and easily through an intuitive dashboard interface.  MapInfo Crime Profiler™ is expected to play a major role in helping improve policing effectiveness in the UK. Three UK police forces have already invested in the solution.

In its latest report on the use of geographical information in the public sector, the UK’s Department for Communities and Local Government (1) has highlighted the urgent need for automation to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of crucial analytical output.  The report notes that: “Current users of geographic information spend 80 per cent of their time collating and managing the information and only 20 per cent analysing it to solve problems and generate benefits. We need to address this imbalance.”  This comment reveals the huge potential efficiency gains possible with a tool such as MapInfo Crime Profiler™.

Analysing patterns of crime from a wide variety of different perspectives helps to direct law enforcement efforts where they can be most effective.  However, these patterns are in a constant state of flux, and the professional crime analyst often has to explore a number of different data combinations, scenarios and geographical aspects in order to provide law enforcement teams with the intelligence they need to be operationally effective.

MapInfo Crime Profiler™ therefore removes the need for analysts to devote a substantial proportion of their efforts to time-consuming statistical manipulation, such as creating macros or pivot tables in SPSS or MS Excel.  Instead, these tasks are automated through a dashboard interface.  Pilot studies have shown that analyst efficiency can be dramatically improved using MapInfo Crime Profiler™.  The new solution allows the analyst to choose automated options including:

•   Multiple real-time hotspotting options and kernal density visualisation
•   Integrated 3D imagery including CCTV footage
•   User-specified temporal analysis (contrasting day/night or other time profiles)
•   Automatic graphing and mapping creation, linking and updates
•   Automated data, table and workspace utilities.

Ian Broadbent, Strategic Industry Manager at Pitney Bowes Business Insight, comments, “In a nutshell, MapInfo Crime Profiler™ introduces significant efficiency and capability gains for police forces across all their key areas of crime analysis and visualisation, including: crime pattern analysis; criminal network, market and business profiles; offender risk analysis; intelligence assessments for individual operations; and law enforcement results analysis.  This new solution builds on proven foundations, as Pitney Bowes Business Insight solutions are already in use by thousands of crime analysts across the world.

“MapInfo Crime Profiler™ helps police forces get the right resources in the right place at the right time, helping to improve detection rates, minimise the number of victims of crime, reduce the fear of crime, protect vulnerable people, manage risk and reduce harm. MapInfo Crime Profiler™ breaks new ground in providing ready-to-use crime analysis software components that save analysts’ time by making analysis tools available at one common point with one common format.  Analyst training is made easier and quicker (high analyst turnover rates are costly in terms of training and short term resource pressures).  Speedier response to operational requirements is enabled.  Management and performance reporting is improved through consistency of output and better information sharing to help improve decision making.  Finally, MapInfo Crime Profiler™ provides an easily scalable “platform” to which new components can be added as new techniques are developed, as a police force’s enterprise needs grow, and as budgets become available.”

Andy Brumwell, Geo-spatial Intelligence Analyst at West Midlands Police – one of the first European Police Forces to invest in MapInfo Crime Profiler™ – has commented on the importance of automation in crime profiling. He says, “As pressure mounts on crime analysts to provide critical support for investigatory and operational effectiveness and efficiency, there is an urgent need for crime mapping tools that automate the majority of basic statistical processing tasks, leaving analysts free to deliver insights to their colleagues, rather than being tied up with mundane work.

“If this level of automation can be achieved, the efficiency gains are very considerable indeed.  Government commentators have recognised that geographical information users as a whole spend four fifths of their time processing information and statistics, rather than actually conducting analysis.  Crime analysts are there to help police forces reduce crime and disorder, and to minimise the public’s concern and fear of crime.  We are obviously restricted in our ability to perform that core job if the burden of information processing reduces effective analytical time to just a fifth of our output.”

Download the MapInfo Crime Profiler™ data sheet or email: [email protected] to receive a copy.