Crime mapping tool recognized

A system designed by Sex Crimes Unit analyst D/Const. Manny San Pedro to monitor sex crimes and offender tracking has won a Pitney Bowes Software People’s Choice Meridian Award. Four years ago, Pitney Bowes developed and implemented a suite of spatial products for the Service, including a web-based mapping application using Korem’s Push ‘n’ See and MapInfo MapXtreme, as a portal to access geocoded data and perform practical crime mapping functionality. The Crime Mapping and Analysis Portal has been used in crime analysis across the Service’s 17 divisions. With this system, the Sex Crimes Unit was able to monitor sex offence incidents and arrests across the city on a daily basis. There were separate database systems that managed these records and as a result members of the unit would run routine searches daily from the various systems to monitor these activities. “When I was redesigning the Sex Crimes Unit intranet website just before the New Year, I decided to incorporate interactive crime mapping for sex offenders and sex offences,” said San Pedro, who has been an officer for the past 24 years. “On the site, you can see where reported sex assaults and potential sex offenders are over a three-week period. It makes it easy to pick out where things are happening and this is very useful for officers, especially those in the field. Frontline members are able to access this portal by way of their mobile workstation in their police vehicles and investigators are able to create their own views of specific areas of the city allowing them to regularly monitor incidents and potential sex offenders.” In addition, officers can share information with other agencies across the province of out of-town offenders arrested and charged in Toronto. The Meridian Awards honour the most innovative applications of Pitney Bowes and Portrait Software solutions and technology. The awards were presented on June 14 at the Insights 12 User conference in New Orleans.  As a result of a Social Media campaign the Crime Mapping portal won in the People’s Choice category garnering over 1,300 5,000 votes as the best favourite software tool. “Each year, we recognize outstanding companies for their innovative and creative use of Pitney Bowes Software technologies and each year the challenge of picking the best becomes more of a challenge for us,” said the organization’s president John O’Hara. “It’s such a pleasure to see some of the amazing ways that companies are using our software to build strong and long-lasting relationships with their customers.”