Scodigo, Inc.

Wow, what an amazing system they have at the Grand Rapids Police Department! Many thanks to Patrick Merrill and Kevin Carpenter for their presentation. I think we ended up going almost an hour over our scheduled time but I noticed that no one left early. It was really great to hear the David and Goliath stories about FileMaker vs. the big iron systems and to see all of the amazing functionality that’s been developed over the years.

Some highlights...

Police cruisers are outfitted with laptops that are synced wirelessly at the beginning and end of each shift. Syncing is done using FileMaker import. The beginning sync updates the laptop with information from the main system and the end sync uploads information gathered throughout the shift.

Officers use the system throughout the day to enter reports and to make things easier, they managed to integrate with their CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system thus allowing officers to avoid duplicate entry. I think the CAD system runs in some sort of terminal emulator on the laptop and it’s able to export a file to disk. FileMaker then comes along, reads the file and populates the report with the CAD info.

Officers also have access to a “bad guys” database that allows them to search for previous offenders. This comes in very handy in the field when trying to identify either a certain person they’re looking for or to identify a person they’re questioning (who may or may not be telling the truth about who they are). Patrick noted how invaluable it is to avoid stopping the wrong person.

One of my favorite functions is something they call “person of interest” or “pointer” for short. As information flows into the system from incident reports and from other systems, they have a robot that checks the data to see if it pertains to any of the people entered as a person of interest. If a person is found, the system automatically sends text message notifications. It’s a simple idea but very useful. Patrick told a story about a witness that had disappeared for an important case, but then got arrested in another county and was able to be brought in for the trial.

Kevin gave us a demo of a FileMaker database he developed to control their firing range. Using a protocol analyzer and the Troi serial plug-in, he figured out how to control the targets and then he added the ability to setup all sorts of different scenarios and even managed to include sounds effects. Very geeky but very cool and a big hit with the department.

More recently they’ve started using charts to show things like the number of incidents throughout the day and Kevin showed us a really great mapping example that uses Google Maps to plot incidents. You can choose the types and dates of the incidents you want to see along with the center point and the radius. It was really amazing to see the data charted out that way and to realize the power of being able to look at where crimes are occurring by type, date and location.

Kevin sent me some links mentioned in his presentation:

This one has a majority of the map examples I used.
http://econym.googlepages.com/index.htm

This one has some interesting examples.
http://www.bdcc.co.uk/Gmaps/BdccGmapBits.htm

This is a website I use for geo coding.
http://geocoder.us/

A website I found useful for getting the Tiger/Line date that I use for creating my own geo coding system.
http://blog.tooleshed.com/?p=16

This is the charting software that I could not remember last night. There is both a free and paid version.
http://www.fusioncharts.com/FileMaker/

Thanks again to Patrick and Kevin and also to everyone that traveled from both near and far on a seriously cold night! And thanks to Parr Crone from Secant for hosting the meeting and for the delicious pizza!

Our next meeting will be held Thursday May 14th and we’ll send out an announcement closer to the time.