Crossing county or state lines was no problem for the Beltway Snipers, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo. But for the law enforcement officials on their trail, jurisdictional boundaries proved to be a major obstacle. A new software program developed by University of Virginia Systems Engineering Professor Donald Brown and his colleagues will help localities overcome this barrier by allowing them to share information contained in their individual geographic information systems (GIS). Shared information will give them the regional perspective necessary to chart the activity of criminals who are increasingly mobile.
The new program is called GRASP, which stands for Geospatial Repository for Analysis and Safety Planning. It builds on the growing acceptance of GIS as an important tool in analyzing and tracking crime. Developed in conjunction with the National Institute of Justice, GRASP is an online spatial data repository that can accommodate data from all major GIS programs.
“GRASP translates the information from these systems and makes it available in a common format,” Brown says. With GRASP up and running, geographically and functionally related agencies can pool their spatial information and view it online in a secure environment.”
In designing GRASP, Brown and his team considered the needs of local law enforcement. It doesn’t require a high degree of technical skill to install, use, or maintain. And because it is based on nonproprietary software, the program is free.
While GRASP may prove useful in tracking serial killers like Muhammad and Malvo, Brown foresees that another use of GRASP will be to track the activities of gangs, which have become a problem in rural areas , as well as in cities. GRASP is currently being tested in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Donald Brown is chair of the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science Department of Systems and Information Engineering. He recently received the IEEE Research Achievement Award from the Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society and the Intelligent Transportation Systems Society of the IEEE in recognition of his “sustained contributions in the area of security and intelligence informatics.”
Brown is also principle investigator on a Keck Foundation Grant to fund the W. M. Keck Foundation Center for THz Spectroscopy for Biological Materials. Brown and Michael DeVore of the Systems and Information Engineering Department; Robert Weikle, Thomas Crowe, Tatiana Globus and Boris Gelmont of the Charles L. Brown Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering ; and Lukas Tamm of the Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics Department and a team of graduate students will work to develop a device for using the terahertz spectrum to study biological molecules.
