Over the last six months the City of Highland Park has experienced an increase in vehicle burglaries. This has led to pressure from residents to reduce the number of vehicle break-ins. The Police Department based on reports and interviews has two people of interest. However, they were looking for a way to confirm their hunches as to which incidents were mostly committed by the suspects from the ones which were truly isolated incidents.

The Police Department asked the GIS Office to create a map of vehicle burglaries. The requested maps showed the location of vehicle break in. The incident locations were colored by the month they occurred in. The symbols were also sized to show how many vehicle break-ins occurred at each location. The final map product was useful not only grouping the incidents by location but establishing time frame when these events occurred. From them map it was easy to see that some of the clusters occurred during a specific month.

All of the suspects were eventually caught and the map is being used as evidence in Court Proceedings. By leveraging the power of GIS the Police Department was able to a product that confirmed some of there hunches as to the some of the incidents being linked. Thus creating a useful piece of evidence for charging the suspects with committing some of the incidents.