GIS Solves Crimes

"At 10:30 one morning in late 2006, two police officers in the city of Toronto parked several blocks away from a nearby school. To passers-by, the police car appeared to have stopped at random; in fact, the pair’s location was carefully planned based on months’ worth of data. When a white van passed less than half an hour later, the officers cautiously followed it before signaling the driver to pull over.

By 11:03 a.m., the driver — a sex offender who had been harassing children in the area for more than a year — was under arrest.

For Manny San Pedro, detective constable and geographic profiling analyst for the Toronto Police, the 33-minute capture is the perfect case to demonstrate how geographic information systems (GIS) are putting officers in a position to solve crime — and just one example of how spatial thinking is changing the way we work today."