Fairfax County, Va., provides real-time access to police data

Fairfax County, Va., provides real-time access to police data

Fairfax County Police Events Mapping App

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Fairfax County Police Events Mapping App
Fairfax County Police Events Mapping App

Using an overhauled mapping app, citizens can access hundreds of police service calls, in addition to neighborhood disturbances, thefts, drug or sex offenses, and more.

In Fairfax County, Va., the police department already has opened up its data to residents. The new and improved Police Events Application, allows citizens to obtain real-time, mobile access to police data. The county has taken its commitment to open government a step further. Now, hundreds of new police service calls are immediately integrated into the system daily from a variety of sources, allowing the county to cut back on time spent gathering data and greatly reducing the need for support calls.

Fairfax County is among the largest counties in the nation, with more than 1 million residents, and one of its goals is to help those residents feel more at ease with access to police data.

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The county’s existing GIS-based Police Events Application had been in use for several years, allowing the public to search, filter and map police service calls by type, location and date, and access preliminary police investigation data from Fairfax County’s 9-1-1 call center.

But with more than a half-million data points from all over the county, the data overwhelmed the existing Oracle relational database. The county’s GIS database contains data from more than 800 different sources, including libraries, schools and hospitals. Most of those sources have unique schemas, making the data difficult to sort through and access. In addition, only a fraction of it was structured data available to the public (through Web applications written in JavaScript), and there was no way to exclude certain GIS datasets from unconstrained search unless they were specifically requested. This meant the existing database had to be searched layer by layer and one column at a time, making searches slow and difficult.

The new GIS database houses more than a half-million data points about police events and geography. This data is now easily accessible to both county employees and county residents via the revamped Police Events Application.