Imagine yourself as a fourth-year U.Va. systems engineering student. As you begin work on your capstone project, you find yourself developing an incredible computer program that will work in tandem with record management systems (RMS) used in police stations across the country. Your program will help law enforcement officials analyze incident data, identify and predict crime trends and better understand the dynamics of crimes in certain jurisdictions. Ultimately, this successful product becomes licensed by one of the premier software providers for public safety organizations, such as law enforcement agencies, fire and rescue services, and even jails.

Although this may sound like a plot to a movie, it’s not — at least not yet. It’s real, and it’s happening here at the U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS).

Based on a decade of information infrastructure for crime analysis research conducted by Donald E. Brown, professor and chair of the Systems and Information Engineering (SIE) Department at SEAS, the Web-based Crime Analysis Toolkit, or WebCAT, was developed and is continually being refined as part of undergraduate student capstone projects. The WebCAT program has been funded since 2001 by the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services and is currently led by James H. Conklin, research scientist in the SIE Department and program director of the department’s newly chartered Predictive Technology Laboratory. As participants in these capstone projects, students are helping to solve a statewide communication challenge: information flow between and among jurisdictions.

Professor Donald E. Brown

Currently, each jurisdiction in Virginia reports crime data to the state police on a monthly basis. This information is collected and reported to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. A one-way flow of data, however, doesn’t allow local law enforcement agencies to share information or conduct crucial regional, historical, categorical or geospatial data analyses. When a police officer writes a report, the “criminal incident” is entered into an RMS to fulfill the reporting obligation. But “calls for service” such as those to 9-1-1, which are equally important to track, are not categorized as criminal incidents and thus are not logged into the system.

U.Va. systems engineering researchers set out to develop a product that not only addressed data analysis and sharing issues but also was user-friendly. WebCAT, with its Web-based format, provides crime analysts and police officers easy access to historical crime data and a suite of tools to analyze such data. The system also enables the sharing of data among jurisdictions and law enforcement agencies.

Users log in to WebCAT and are able to run queries to search and identify crimes by characteristics such as location or use of a weapon. The system then generates graphs, reports and maps of crime data based on the queries. WebCAT can detect such trends as when and where particular crimes are more likely to occur — information that Conklin says could aid law enforcement in more effectively deploying its resources.

Virginia counties and associated crime frequencies by color

WebCAT is much more than a sophisticated computer program that can help police stations run more efficiently. Its real complexity is in the research conducted before the program was even built. Department faculty, researchers and doctoral students used fundamental systems engineering principles to develop intricate mathematical models that would make these WebCAT analyses work.

“It is just like the mathematical models you would come up with to explain and predict a flow process or a chemical process,” Brown says. “After the research has been completed, a mathematical model can be developed to comprehensively understand — and perhaps improve — the process, and from that point the software can be built.”

Building the software was no easy task. Last summer, students Jeff Bordogna (SE ’07) and Mark Mitchell (SE ’07), among others, worked with Conklin to rebuild, recode and redesign WebCAT to expand its functionality. This academic year, they have further refined the toolkit so that it can analyze text incident data and the narrative description of criminal action that appears on a police officer’s report. These upgrades also can enable WebCAT to identify crime trends over the long term and assist police in better understanding the dynamics of crime in their jurisdiction.

With technology like WebCAT becoming available, several industry leaders have taken an early interest in research conducted in this arena. For example, DaProSystems, which provides software for public-safety agencies, immediately saw the value in providing its customers with ways to do more than just track incident data. It licensed WebCAT in July 2006 from the Engineering School’s SIE Department — thus making it available to all Virginia law enforcement agencies — with the understanding that the team would continue to expand the toolkit’s capabilities.

Photo by Tom Cogill.

The WebCAT Capstone Team

“It is really amazing to see years of research become the backbone for a series of student projects to produce a product that is in demand. The students working on this project had the opportunity to see a true technology transfer from the university to the marketplace,” Brown says.

Plans for expanding WebCAT’s capabilities include the ability to store and categorize additional data types (including calls for service, warrants, arrests, and names and characteristics of people) and the development of advanced analysis tools that could help predict the location of future crimes and automatically detect changes in crime patterns. Additionally, within the next two years, the team hopes to add crime-association functionality to the program, whereby text-dense reports are automatically read and categorized by related features so that similarities between incidences can be quickly identified. As a result of Conklin’s ongoing conversations with local law enforcement agencies, WebCAT will evolve to comprehensively meet the needs of the end user.

James H. Aylor, dean of the U.Va. Engineering School, says projects such as these get at “the core of engineering” by improving processes to make our world a better place. “My hat is off to the great students, research scientists and professors who remained on the leading edge of technology and the demands of the marketplace to develop WebCAT,” Aylor says. “It is an invaluable product that is meeting a significant need in our society.”