GIS Project Proposal #1 MSGIS

Why do this project?
The City of Redlands is an average-sized city that is rapidly becoming a representative example of ESRI’s market base. For this reason, Redlands stands to be the model city for
the adoption of GIS technology. GIS has been a part of the police department’s regular business process since the mid 90’s, and there are two crime analysts and a database
technician that will be available to facilitate your success with this project.

The City of Redlands holds an enterprise GIS license and is also a user of the Omega Group’s CrimeView, one of ESRI’s most active business partners. There is an explicit need
for this project, and there is a culture of acceptance and data sharing with the Redlands Police Department and the City of Redlands. Here is your chance to work with an
emerging field of GIS.


There are two very attractive features to partnering with us:
1. We are close enough to meet with frequently.
2. Your client has been through the U of Redlands MSGIS program, and understands what
the MIP process entails. Scope creep will be minimized and we’ll tailor your project to suit
your needs and interests.

What is this project about?

Time-based correlative analysis
There are currently 16 cars being tracked by in-car GPS
units in the RPD. The GPS unit is embedded in the wireless
modem and updates the live signal to the server. This produces
a database that is transfered from the UNIX environment
into a SQL table. We regualrly geoprocess this into a
feature class. The table identifies which incidents are being
worked on, or if the officer is on proactive patrol time.
What we need is a time-based correlative analysis to answer
the question: are the officers patrolling the right places at
the right times? Because this is a new process for police
departments and crime analysis units, this methodology
stands to be very repeatable and will be shared with the
broader crime analysis community. We have developed
some concepts, but there will be an opportunity to brainstorm
use case scenarios and produce an original solution to
a new problem.

Product
There is flexibility for what the data-product will entail, but
the ideal situation will include a series of geoprocessing
tasks and a series of ArcGIS Server mapservices to be
shown through intranet-based applications and desktop
clients.
Support for your MIP will include regular access to our
network and our staff. For this reason, a light background
check will be necessary.

Who should I contact about this project?

Philip Mielke
Interim GIS Administrator
City of Redlands
pmielke@cityofredlands.org
909-335-4784
redlandsgis.blogspot.com
gis.cityofredlands.org

Flash for Animated Crime Maps

This is a earlier example (much earlier- 2002) of using animation to tell a story within a mapping environment. This is a gallery of animated maps showing burglary, assaults, all incidents, and vehicle thefts year-by-year. Also included is an example of an hour-by-hour analysis of traffic collisions.

Methodology
This is completed by exporting individual layers into Macromedia (Now Adobe) Flash. Flash is a perfect medium for this because it is able to handle raster and vectors with different levels of compression. In these (old...) examples, the densities(rasters) are vectorized, reducing the size substantially. What would be a 30-100MB avi file exported from ArcScene is an 80kb swf file.
I teach a class about this, and have since (2005) developed a way to incorporate Modelbuilder to create and symbolize the densities automatically.

CityWorks Service Request Report (video)

Here is a short video highlighting how great the Cityworks Service Request Report helps the City of Redlands keep better tabs on their resources and how they are being utilized. As calls for Quality of Life issues are taken, this helps to geographically prioritize work as well as keeping duplicate work orders (two neighbors complaining about the same issue) down to a minimum.

Wildfire Urban Interface UML

Renee has been working on a UML diagram to better understand how to model fire risk for her Major Individual Project at the University of Redlands MSGIS program. This is part of the conceptualization phase of the project, and this diagram helps to explain the relationship different entities have with each other. This phase helps her think through the process of geodatabase creation.

City of Redlands GIS Architecture

We're on the move with the deployment of our enterprise GIS license within the City of Redlands. The overall obstacle is working with four distinct networks (Municipal Utilities, Police, Emergency Ops/Fire, and Quality of Life/City), and this presents a challenge with serving large datasets and bottleneck points. We intend to reach out and provide enterprise and desktop solutions to department other than the server-based IMS (Internet Mapping System) sites.

This is an overall diagram of the current GIS Server Architecture for the City of Redlands and will serve as a base for growth and strategic planning. (click on the image for a full-size diagram)

Redlands GIS News, Issue 1

Welcome to the first installment of the Redlands GIS News. In these communiqués the City will not only outline how GIS technology is currently being utilized within the City, but also provide status on current implementations and identification of future plans for extending GIS throughout the enterprise.

The focus of this initial edition will be to provide a brief overview of the GIS products currently available within the City and to summarize the current GIS projects staff is working on.

EXISTING GIS CAPABILITY

City Website
The City currently utilizes ArcIMS to provide many products through the City GIS website which is at http://gis.cityofredlands.org. The departments supported and some of the data provided include the following:

Municipal Utilities
Capital Improvement projects, Water System, Storm Network, Sidewalk Survey, Traffic Sign and Signal inventory
Police
Incidents, Arrestees, Collisions, Citations.
Redevelopment
Businesses, RDA & CDBG boundaries
Fire / EOC
Fire Demand Zones, High Fire Hazard Areas, HAZMAT locations, Response zones
Quality of Life
City owned trees, groves, street network, parks, trails, solid waste areas
Community Development
Zoning, General Plan, FEMA Flood Plain

Other support
GIS also provides data to the City’s new One Stop Permit Center, supports other ongoing services such as map generation, and supports applications such as CrimeView, GeoNotify, Veritracks, and provides data to the Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit.
CURRENT MAJOR PROJECTS

CityWorks (Azteca) – This is a new project at the City to provide a common map-based Work Order solution to the enterprise. It is anticipated to be rolled out first to the Quality of Life and Municipal Utilities and Engineering departments.

CAD system upgrade (Spillman) – The Police Department will be utilizing a new ArcGIS Server addressing system to support dispatch. This will facilitate new created and mapped addresses to immediately show up in the PD’s addressing system.

WebEOC (ESi) – This system provides an electronic method for data entry and dissemination within the City’s EOC to better communicate during an incident. These electronic boards will replace the current use of white boards currently around the EOC.


IN SUMMARY

We look forward to communicating on our progress utilizing GIS technology within the City of Redlands on a regular basis in the future. We hope that this provides a window into how the City of Redlands plans to use technology to better serve not only the city staff, but the residents and visitors to Redlands. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.


David Hexem, Chief Information Officer
dhexem@cityofredlands.org
Philip Mielke, Interim GIS Administrator
pmielke@cityofredlands.org

City of Redlands Information Technology
35 Cajon
Redlands, CA 92373

Street Signs Project- Working in the field (virtually)

Mike Wahl (our great intern- anyone want to hire him?) has been saving time and money, which is great in times like these. We needed a street sign layer for our Cityworks project. Essentially, Cityworks is a GIS-enabled work order system, and we want to be able to tie work orders to sign feature classes. We didn't need sub-meter accuracy, and getting GPS-points in the field would have been overkill (in this case- there are plenty of places for GPS collection).

This is written by Mike:

The purpose of this project is to identify and locate all city street signs and street lights within the City of Redlands that have not been geocoded previously. In this screenshot the red line indicates a street segment that has been checked and all the street signs on that street have been identified. The green line means that the street segment has not yet been checked. The blue line is a segment that has been selected (as seen in the ‘Attributes of Streets’ box at the bottom) and will be checked. The small dots represent the street lights and the large pink dots represent the street signs. The highlighted street sign (toward the middle of the screen) is a stop sign as can be seen in the TYPE column of the ‘Attributes’ box at the left. There are many types of street signs and a large part of this project is to identify which type they are.


In order to identify and locate the city street signs we use the Street View feature in Google Maps. The stop sign seen above is the street sign that was highlighted in Arc Map. The Google Map Street View is current data and by using it the project can be completed quicker than if we were to take gps coordinates from every individual street sign in the field. The only problems are that some of the signs are hard to see and some of the streets are not covered either due to construction or that the street was not on their list to cover. Despite these limitations the majority of street signs can be identified and any field work will be cut down to a minimum if need be.


At this time (11/25/08) nearly half of the city streets have been checked. This process has taken over forty hours to accomplish in what would have taken several months to accomplish in the field.

Disaster Mitigation Models for the City of Redlands

This is a Major Individual Project (MIP) project proposal by Renee Bousselaire from the University of Redlands MSGIS Program. We're glad to work with her, and will gradually add more content and rough examples of the models (with her permission) as they are developed.

Earthquake history shows that the southern San Andreas fault has earthquakes an average of once every one hundred and fifty years with a magnitude of 7.0 or greater. The last two major earthquakes on the southern San Andreas fault occurred in 1680 and 1812. Certain areas, close to San Bernardino County, are at risk because they have gone the longest without major earthquake activity (Jones, et al. 2008). Earthquake modeling has been conducted at the federal and state level for California, but the City of Redlands requires analysis at the city level. This project will demonstrate how ArcGIS spatial operators, ModelBuilder, and network functions can aid in disaster mitigation efforts for the City of Redlands, California. Based on predefined water pipeline breaks, the water response model will use geometric network features and Network Analyst to combine water pipeline and transportation networks to model which valves need to be turned off and how long it will take responders to reach the valves. The fire behavior model will use ModelBuilder and a variety of spatial operators to assign risk values to fuel loads, weather, and topography to create an output layer identifying probable fire locations. The models will serve as an introductory component of a larger disaster plan for the City of Redlands

Geography & Public Safety: Using Geographic Information Systems to Support Broken Windows Policing

When New York City police began
targeting graffiti crews and turnstile
jumpers instead of the city’s rampant violence
and crack use, many critics objected. But when
their strategy gave way to success, police began
seriously considering broken windows policing
as an excellent crime-reduction policy. Today,
police can use geographic information system
tools to reduce blight and graffiti in a city and
enhance broken windows policing strategies.
Broken windows policing is a theory
developed by George Kelling and James
Wilson. It suggests that if minor crimes and
disorders are targeted, major crime will be
prevented. In other words, an environmental
context sets norms of acceptable behavior—if
one window is broken, vandals will think that
breaking windows is an acceptable behavior.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell highlights
these ideas in his book, The Tipping Point,
illustrating that many relatively benign factors
can combine to produce a “tip” in forces at
play. Criminal behavior or public disorder
grows exponentially rather than following
a straight linear path; thus, targeting small
crimes and blight can have an outstanding
effect on city crime prevention.

Crime analysts can respond to blight and
graffiti issues within a city in many different
ways. Maps using different data sources help
analysts consider the environmental factors at
play and make crime prevention a major factor
in a city’s planning and development. When
creating a plan for citywide crime prevention,
geographic information system (GIS)
analysts must combine officers’ observations
of neighborhood crime and disorder with
external data and policing initiatives.
Riverside’s Graffiti Abatement Partnership

(This article refers to Riverside CA's Graffiti abatement program. It further highlights a server-based system that utilizes GPS-enabled cameras to take images and data in the field. Public works and the PD work on the same business process. It's a great highlight of city departments working together for problem-solving initiatives).
More here...

Geography & Public Safety: Creating Base Maps and Layer Files for Cartographic Consistency

Crime analysts create maps that focus on a specific problem. An analyst’s goal in creating a map should be to show how the data that matter to the audience are significant. He or she accomplishes this by establishing cartographic standards that officers can follow to understand the geographic elements of the problem in question.

As time passes, data will change. Consequently, a geographic representation of the problem will change. The way the problem is represented should be consistent. This article will discuss how to create consistent standards when making a map. It includes instructions for creating layer files,
describes base map production, and provides useful tips for making maps.
More here...

Geography & Public Safety: Using ModelBuilder for Geographic Information System Tasks

This was published in the National Institute of Justice's Geography and Public Safety Bulletin:


Crime analysis requires a Geographic Information System (GIS)—a software program for capturing, managing, and analyzing geographic and spatial data—to process data and create data products (e.g., printed maps, pamphlets) for a wide audience. Crime data can change daily, which makes producing maps and other products a daunting task for many analysts. Automating regular tasks will save time and allow for more sophisticated tools for analysis. Crime analysts need a mapping program that allows them to regularly update data in a timely fashion. Environmental Systems Research Institute’s (ESRI) ModelBuilder is a component of a type of ArcMap that allows for drag-and-drop development of complex geoprocessing tasks (e.g., placing points on the map based on addresses, summarizing data). It helps crime analysts expedite their daily geoprocessing tasks for map production.

Advancing Earlier Modeling Tools

ESRI’s ModelBuilder is a drag-and-drop process modeling environment that comes standard with ArcMap version 9.x. ModelBuilder is an advancement of ArcView 3.x’s Geoprocessing Wizard Extension. Where the Geoprocessing Wizard was limited to tasks like spatially joining, merging, and clipping data, ESRI introduces all of ArcMap’s functional capabilities (e.g., spatial analysis, geoprocessing) into the Toolbox. A large number of different tools and tasks can be strung together in the literal sense of a systems technology: data go in, a process occurs, and data come out. The potential to string complex tasks together and automate them to run regularly makes ModelBuilder an attractive option for any Crime Analysis Unit.

The rest of the article, and a series of other articles can be found at
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/gpsBulletin-2008v1.pdf.pdf