Recently, a number of our municipal clients have queried help on implementing a community-driven program that allows citizens to submit crimes to the local police department by harnessing the resident’s video surveillance equipment and leveraging GIS to notify and coordinate with the public to help solve and even deter crimes in the community.
Utilizing a Survey123 Form, members of the community have the chance to submit information regarding their video surveillance equipment (like Ring & Chime products) to the local police department for when it may be useful for helping the department solve crimes. In the Survey123 form, users submit answers to a set of required questions, with a block for optional information regarding their security camera equipment. Once a resident submits their information, they are added as a feature in a hosted feature layer that is used by a Web Application with Esri’s Public Notification widget. The local police department can use this to notify and contact program registrants who can share surveillance footage or images that could potentially lead to the resolution of a crime committed in the community.
Through this widget in the application, the local police departments can enter or select the location of recently occurred crimes from the map. From there, a search distance can be applied (500 sq.feet, half mile, etc.) and the widget then selects the program registrants who have submitted their information using the Survey123 form that are within the previously specified search radius. Then, they can be exported (along with all of their relevant information) into a spreadsheet which can be used to contact and notify those program participants to see if their security cameras captured anything that would be useful to them in their investigation.
For more information on how we can help with web applications and data visualizations, get ahold of us at cloudpointgeo.com/contact and let us know what you’re working on. We’re here to tackle your biggest problems with the power of GIS.