Mario Virgilio Santos
Fernando
Office of Information Systems
Public Security Police (PSP)
Portugal

Biography
Mário Virgilio dos Santos Fernando was born on 18/03/1969 in Coimbra, Portugal. Is a Public Security Police agent, graduate in geography, specialising in planning and management from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon in 2003. Returned to the police in 2004 and in 2005 he moved to the Planning and Research Unit of the National Directorate in the area of advisory and technical advice. In 2009 moved to the operations department for working in the neighbourhood programmes such as safe schools among others, producing statistical analysis. In 2012 joined the office of information systems to accompany the draft GIS in the Public Security Police.

Abstract
Local Geographic Observation of Analysis, Patterns of Crime and Accidents in Urban Portuguese Areas - The Public Security Police Approach

Decision making is a routine activity of the Public Security Police (PSP) involves several technical requirements, which have to meet multifaceted challenges. The PSP is known as the security force responsible for the policing in large urban areas of Portugal with a specific knowledge about the distribution of criminal activity in the urban space. Knowing the location of black spots of road accidents is also very important to prevent them, to identify the risks and probability for criminality. The PSP is divided into regional, metropolitan and district commands, which are divided into divisions and police stations. The areas occupied by these units and subunits are highly heterogeneous and reflect the weight of the populations they serve. This work shows that the use of the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in the Public Security Police influences the decision-making process. For example, it influences the area patrolling; the most exposed streets are more intensively patrolled. On the other hand, police prevention and road inspection are also carried out in a more efficient way. With the development of an Application Programming Interface, the PSP is now able to georeference all crimes and all road accidents in their areas of responsibility and opened its doors to the GIS as an intelligence tool. Since 2013 it produces density maps (heatmaps) to identify conurbations and high concentrations of crime. It performs cluster analysis of crimes and analysis of hot-spots of road accidents. Demographic analysis is equally important to understand the behavior patterns and motivations for crime and therefore it crosses the crime analysis with the demographic, social and economic data. It also produces thematic maps on diverse topics: population density or the total of crimes in each municipality. In summary, despite not having the ability to include the preferences, experiences and decision maker's intuitions - characteristics that are important for the activity of any security force - the GIS at the PSP is a specialized tool for decision-making and somehow can be responsible for the positive changes in the Portuguese police.