GIS-based decision support system for criminal tracking

This paper aims to develop a GIS-based decision support system to help in improving the police personnel response to crimes. The system aids the police personnel to get critical spatial and non-spatial information. The system can identify the nearest police stations to the crime location, and also determine the shortest route from the selected police station to the crime location. Moreover, in case of the criminal escape, the system identifies the escape area and possible escape routes of the criminal, and the nearest police stations within the escape area. A geodatabase is designed to include data layers of major and minor roads, police stations and security centers. The development of the system is carried out using ArcGIS 10 with network analyst and spatial analyst extensions. ArcGIS provides its own application programming in the form of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to build the user interface. Results show that the proposed system is useful in rapid response and criminal tracking.