Solving City Problems

Of all the news to come out of the ESRI-UC, one story was a little more inspirational than the rest. The story talked about how Martin O'Malley, current Governor of Maryland and former Baltimore Mayor, used GIS to help fight crime and improve City services.

Last January, new Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn asked for help in improving their access to crime data. He was quoted saying,

"How many crimes did we have in the last 24 hours, the last week, the last month? How does it compare to last year at this time? How does it compare to two years ago at this time? Where is it occurring? We have an extraordinarily hard time producing that level of data right now."

Let us hope that the solution includes geospatial technologies. Perhaps in ten years we'll be hearing about the Milwaukee success story.