Twenty persons attached to the various divisions of the Ministry of Public Security are currently participating in a two-day training exercise on crime mapping.
The training, which commenced yesterday, is being coordinated by the ministry and facilitated by Geographic Information System (GIS) consultant Valrie Grant. Grant was last year awarded a $16.5 million contract to map crime hotspots in Region Four. The project falls under the ministry’s Citizen Security Strengthening Programme (CSSP).
At the launching ceremony yesterday, CSSP Project Manager Dr Clement Henry highlighted that the commencement of the training is a very important activity for the CSSP. “It is one of our key activity when we commenced the Crime Observatory Unit several years ago. It was always our intention to start doing spatial analysis and today we are moving another step closer to being able to conduct spatial analysis,” he said.
Henry added that the GIS training will allow participants to understand where crime and violence are occurring and provide data analysis that would help to design social programmes and strategies to address crime and violence.
“This activity is one that syncs all of the…components of our programme. That is, crime prevention, improving and strengthening police ability in crime prevention and violence prevention, and supporting the rehabilitation and integration of ex-inmates,” he explained.
He further added that utilising GIS will allow them to gather data and provide a spatial understanding of where vulnerabilities exist. “…Therefore our approaches, strategies and constraints will be targeted and we will be able to achieve the desired results,” Henry emphasised.
According to Henry, at the CSSP, they have seen the need to incorporate technology into their work and have been able to see the necessary results. “Since the CSSP started, we have moved in the direction to doing all our surveys digitally. We saw this as an important first step in moving from manually collecting data and utilising technology, reduce the actual cost and improve accuracy in the conduct of the survey and analysis,” he said.
Stepping into the next phase, he said, they saw it fit to engage Grant and have her “offer her skills set so there can be knowledge transfer so in Guyana we are able to do that type of analysis.”
The participants in the training are drawn from the Crime & Social Observatory Unit, the Strategic Planning and Information Technology Units of the Guyana Police Force (GPF), the Information Technology Unit of the Guyana Prison Service and members from the Crime and Social Observatory Steering Committee. During the two-day training, participants will be trained to utilise geospatial technology and visual analytics for crime reporting, mapping, and analysis.
Henry highlighted that the long-term goal of the CSSP is to ensure that every sub-division of the GPF is equipped with at least one crime analyst residing there who has the skills to perform spatial analysis.
Sharing an overview of the training, Grant said that participants will be introduced to GIS. She added that the training is designed to make persons, who are responsible for maintaining and managing the systems, competent.
“We will be doing capacity building with those persons so that they are effective in handling their responsibilities,” she said.
Outlining the course, the GIS specialist said that participants will be able “to understand what is GIS, how GIS affects crime analysis, the use of the software data collection and import, how we can do analysis, how to edit data for quality assurance and quality control, and we will be looking at how they can present the data using paper maps and web maps and how they can use it in their day-to-day operations and use it in their jobs…”
She pointed out that crime is a geographic phenomenon and using GIS will allow persons to understand trends and make predictions and put preventative systems in place.
Incident
“…Crime is an incident and everything happens somewhere, which means it is a geographic phenomenon. The fact that it is a geographic phenomenon, the Geographic Information System is a useful technology. It allows persons [to understand] where things are occurring, where future things could potentially occur, do predictive analysis, help to understand the trends, understand the hotspots, look at historic information so that they can do strategic analysis and look at more recent information so that they can do tactical analysis to how to combat this problem of crime,” Grant explained.
She added that by the end of the project, which is expected to conclude in three months, the necessary infrastructure will be in place. The human factor, she said, is the most critical part of the infrastructure for the GIS mapping system to be efficient.
“At the end of the project, there will be all the necessary infrastructure in place so that can be built upon as we continue to develop and maintain the system that will be created. The most critical is having the right people in place. The training is so critical because we are not coming to give a system, we are coming to build a system that suits the needs of Guyana,” she elaborated.
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Team leader Dr Jason Wilks, in his brief address, lauded Guyana’s dive into the technological age. He said that one of the IDB’s mandates in relation to the CSSP was to commit to adopting Information Technology.
Government, in August 2018, announced its “no objection” to the award of the crime mapping contract to Grant.
“This crime mapping consultancy will depict spatial [spread] of crimes in Region Four. The project will give serious crimes and geocode them… the occurrence of crime as per geographic locations and create communicative maps so that Guyanese citizens will be able to see [a] digital map that depicts where crimes are occurring based on crime data,” then Minister of State Joseph Harmon had said. He informed that this data will include the type of crime, date, time and location and said that the information will be displayed like Google Maps and other streets maps that are available on the internet.
