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Annual savings of over £1 000 000

Local government: Crime prevention

Annual savings of over £1 000 000
 The government has set high expectations for crime resolution and we believe that GIS is a valuable tool to help forces achieve their targets.
Superintendent Peter McGuinness, South Yorkshire Police

At a glance

South Yorkshire PoliceAn Intranet-based intelligence solution using Ordnance Survey mapping allows police officers across South Yorkshire to access detailed, up-to-date information about communities, crime and antisocial behaviour at the touch of a button.

Printable version: download PDFVisit the South Yorkshire Police website

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South Yorkshire Police (SYP) operates across the county boroughs of Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster and covers an area of approximately 1 554 square kilometres (with 3 400 police officers and 200 support staff serving a population of 1.2 million). SYP recognised that geographical information systems (GIS) had the potential to help its community police officers work more effectively by providing them with better information about the communities they served, precisely when they needed it. Simply put, the force’s goal was to deliver more intelligence, for less money.

SYP developed an intuitive web-based solution called Intranet Mapping Solution (IMS) based on ESRI®’s ArcGIS® solution and its Crime Analyst Extension. IMS allows officers to view information for several different categories of crime. Officers can now see recorded crimes, reports of antisocial behaviour, offenders living in an area, the locations of CCTV cameras and automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) devices, defined areas of police activity (such as stop and search areas), types of premises, demographic and ethnicity data and more besides.

In the future, IMS will be expanded to interoperate with additional systems, such as the fire service and firearms registry, providing a simple and quick interface. It is tightly integrated with other key police systems, and there are automatic data feeds which ensure that users have visibility of near real-time data. This means that officers not only see where incidents occurred but also on which days and at which times.

Embedded in the system is Ordnance Survey’s Points of Interest data, which, for example, allows officers to match robberies at cash machines to the location of nightclubs. It also allows staff to identify where flashpoints of trouble are in relation to key premises such as pubs and clubs, thereby providing information for more efficient resource deployment and planning.

Display showing crime, intelligence and incident themesCCTV and traffic camera image

  • Based on conservative estimates and calculations to date, SYP expects to make annual savings in excess of £1 000 000.
  • Time taken to pull together demographic and ethnicity data on a specific area or community, in response to a request for information, has been reduced from 4 hours to 2 minutes. Therefore, based on an average salary of £20 per hour, the cost of providing this data has reduced from £80 to less than £2.
  • Ad hoc mapping enquiries, which used to take at least 40 minutes to handle, are now dealt with in two minutes, reducing average costs from over £13 to less than £2.
  • The initiative has allowed SYP to make full use of its investment in geographic information supplied by Ordnance Survey, providing an accurate geographic context to crime data.

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