This collection grew out of a prototype case
tracking and mapping application that was developed for the United
States Attorney's Office (USAO), Southern District of New York
(SDNY). The SDNY is the federal prosecuting office for Manhattan and
Bronx counties in New York City, as well as Westchester County and
several other northern counties. The office's primary mission is to
investigate and prosecute federal crimes in these counties. The case
tracking and mapping application was developed for SDNY to move from
the traditionally episodic way of handling cases to a comprehensive
and strategic method. The purpose was to create a system that could
collect case information and link it to specific geographic locations,
and collect information either not handled at all or not handled with
sufficient enough detail by SDNY's existing case management
system. This would give SDNY the ability to cut across agency lines
and establish geographic connections between criminals and federal
cooperators. The system allowed an in-depth analytic capacity of the
entire federal landscape for the Southern District of New York.
The system that was created was an end-user
application designed to be run largely by SDNY's nontechnical
staff. It consisted of two components, a database to capture case
tracking information and a mapping component to link case and
geographic data. The case tracking data were contained in a Microsoft
Access database and the client application contained all of the forms,
queries, reports, macros, table links, and code necessary to enter,
navigate through, and query the data. The mapping application was
developed using Environmental Systems Research Institute's (ESRI)
ArcView 3.0a GIS. This collection shows how the user-interface of the
database and the mapping component were customized to allow the staff
to perform spatial queries without having to be geographic information
systems (GIS) experts. Part 1 of this study contains the Visual Basic
script used to customize the user-interface of the Microsoft Access
database. Part 2 contains the Avenue script used to customize ArcView
to link the data maintained in the server databases, to automate the
office's most common queries, and to run simple analyses.
Other
Visual Basic script and Avenue script
None.