Everything that happens in the world happens in a specific location. The ability to situate and analyze that piece of information in combination with a million other bits of data from satellites or drones or ground-based devices provides vantage points that clears away the clutter, allows patterns to be found, and important things to be seen more clearly.
Avneep Dhingra interviewed Mike King, a geospatial law enforcement expert, on the ways GIS technologies can help in the analysis of crime patterns in this article from Geospatial World:
Agencies around the world rely upon ArcGIS and GIS technologies alike for mapping, routing and crime analysis functions. It provides insight into demographics, historical imagery and visualization of initial contact sites, crime scenes and disposal sites. Whether you’re investigating repetitive crimes with lone-wolf perpetrators or sophisticated criminal organizations, you can better analyze crime patterns or manage special operations and understand trends and patterns with GIS.
Law enforcement and crime scene investigators rely on ArcGIS to document crime and accident scenes by using easy-to-configure web applications like Collector, or Survey123, to show evidentiary and general points of interest in a geographic way.
Locations can be collected using high accuracy GPS collection tools or by visually placing information on a map via desktop or mobile applications. Adding content like recently flown drone imagery or ingesting data with building information models or 3D data makes maps more powerful tools for accident re-creation, investigation or for courtroom presentations.Location technology is widely used throughout the call reception process and as part of the call-routing function, where the emergency call is routed to the appropriate PSAP (public safety answering point) or command and control facility. There, location is used to identify which first-responders should be assigned to the call for service and optimize routes to the scene (taking into account traffic, roadblocks, detours, etc.). GIS provides agencies with the capability to better understand, update and maintain address databases, crucial for identifying and providing dispatchable locations.