Geographical Search in SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence

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Do you remember Pokemon Go – Gotta catch ‘em all!? I have a lot of fond memories of our family going out to different PokeStops at all hours of the day and night trying to catch characters like Gyrados who was rare in our city. It was so fun! Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before there was loitering, vandalism, and some ill-willed people that took advantage of the location feature of the game to lure unsuspecting victims to specific locations with the intent of robbing them or doing physical harm.

With an uptick in police reports filed during these events, law enforcement agencies were able to start tracking crime locations to keep an eye on possible suspects. In this post, I demonstrate one way to use SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence to perform a search within a specified geographical area to track crime.

Let’s say a popular TikTok streamer is popping up in cities around town giving away promotional items. At five of the eight events that have taken place so far, there have been multiple reports of stolen wallets or purses. Local law enforcement personnel have logged the theft reports including their locations in the system. With nine more events left on the tour, the investigator is looking for patterns to find the suspect before the next event.

I start on the search page entering an asterisk for a global search. In the Filters pane, I select the check box next to Crime Report to filter the results to show only Crime Reports.

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I want to see the results on a map, so I select Map View from the data view menu and zoom in. We see several object pins on the map.

Make a note that for results to appear on a map, there must be geographical data (latitude and longitude values) associated with the object.

To search in a specific area, from the map toolbar, I click Search inside a polygon. I click the map to start defining the area I want to search. I click multiple points to capture all of the locations for the promotional events, making sure to click back on the original point so to close the polygon.

Now I go back to the search field and entered TikTok as a search term. The map updates showing only the crimes with TikTok in the report.

I can hover over a pin for quick information, or I can click a pin to see additional details in the Object Inspector. The information you see is dependent on how the administrator configured the object. Or I can double-click the pin to open the object and see all the information.

Once I saw my results in a map view, to view them in a different way, I selected the table view. This created a list with configured details. Notice that the search term TikTok appears in the detail below each object.

With my geographical data results the investigator can go on to do things like add these objects to a workspace and continue the investigation to drill down on probable reasons and suspects that might be connected to the TikTok promotional events to possibly catch the suspect before the next event.

SAS Law Enforcement Intelligence utilizes searches in many ways. This is just one way to perform a search within a specified geographical area to track crime.

Find more articles from SAS Global Enablement and Learning here.