Bart Cops Go Gis

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) goes through a number of cities and counties, so its police force must work with other public safety agencies, though BART’s officers have the same training and powers of arrest as city police officers and county sheriffs’ deputies.

A few years ago, the BART police began upgrading the technology they use, including adding a GIS system through an e-government grant from MapInfo. The police got MapInfo Professional, which lets them create and edit data sets, perform detailed analyses, and import and export data, and Discovery, which lets them publish map layers on an intranet or the Internet.

Implementing the project meant pulling all the rail data together, coding stations and adding property borders; officers usually use freeways to go between stations, so a link was added to the highway patrol dispatch Web site that has traffic incident reports.

Also included are the access points that BART police use to get to the trackway, and emergency exits.

For Dispatch personnel, this is a large step away from having to look up the information in binders and filing cabinets. The GIS also has track safety information, and users can look up the speed of trains, clearance in tunnels, and employee approval requirements.

Eventually the GIS is to be made accessible to other area police and EMS agencies.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Government Technology (10/04) Vol. 17, No. 10, P. 42; Harris, Blake.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Indianapolis Star (10/25/04) P. 1B; Tuohy, John.