American Sentinel's GIS program is a perfect fit for the skills that police officers currently have to supplement their work experience, according to the university.
"Experienced police officers have a very advanced level of knowledge about their communities and that information is inherently spatial in nature through the links between the various neighborhoods, public spaces, people and activities that are occurring throughout the year," says Stephen McElroy, GIS program chair at American Sentinel University.
He says that a police officer's expertise functions like mental GIS where the officer observes changing patterns in the community on a weekly and monthly basis. GIS skills enable a police officer to understand the complexity of existing crime data that translates into establishing and recognizing meaningful patterns on various scales.
"Although pushpin crime maps are fairly simple, they provide a basic mechanism for the visualization of crimes in a region," says Dr. McElroy. "The mapping and reporting of crime statistics is increasingly becoming the norm at the local level and the use of GIS maps depict and reinforce that knowledge. The examination of comparisons between different crime data sets allows the police to understand and mitigate crime risks to build safer communities."
Since beginning the B.S. Geographic Information Systems program in June 2013, Senior Cpl. Beaty has already learned so much. He is now his department's new crime GIS analyst and is responsible for compiling geospatial data that comes into the Dallas Police Department, processing it with ESRI software and creating maps that help the police department track and interpret criminal activity throughout the city.
