Alabama Dashboards for Visualization, Analysis and Coordinated Enforcement

ADVANCE was established by the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center (ACJIC) in order to provide the criminal justice and public safety communities with the latest advances in analytic and visualization technologies. A dashboard is defined to be the output display of summary data analysis that is of particular immediate value to the user. Dashboards present to users metrics that are an essential component of control. Similar to an auto dashboard, information dashboards are set up to display several important operational characteristics of either a single user’s view or an entire system’s key attributes to both advise of progress and issue warnings.

ADVANCE was developed for ACJIC by The University of Alabama’s Center for Advanced Public Safety (CAPS). It is supported by several tools that have been developed by CAPS over the years, including the basic data structures and efficient retrieval techniques that are an integral part of the Critical Analysis Reporting Environment (CARE). In fact, the ADVANCE system can call CARE directly to enable the user to get to any subset of the underlying database, and to generate information directly from the CARE information mining engine (IMPACT). CAPS has also built into ADVANCE the ability to search and display particular records and to generate standardized reports.

Currently ADVANCE produces dashboards by being pointed to any of the following CAPS-developed databases:

This electronic citations generation and processing system is an automated method that enables officers to easily generate citations in a matter of minutes, validate the defendant’s identity, view their previous records, upload the citation and electronically “swear” to the citations at the applicable court.

An electronic traffic crash reporting and transmission system developed by CAPS working under the direction and close collaboration of the Alabama Department of Public Safety to assure that it is both compliant with federal standards and as user friendly to officers in the field as possible.

The UCR Local Template for Reporting and Analysis (ULTRA) is a system to assist local agencies in creating and submitting their Uniform Crime Reports. ULTRA is a smart-client software application that allows agencies to create and submit Alabama Uniform Incident Offense (IO) and Arrest reports to ACJIC via the Internet.

There are several other databases that will be processed by ADVANCE in the near future. The following are in the immediate plans:

eWeight
A database of weight inspection data for commercial vehicles.

eInspection
A database of general safety inspection data for commercial vehicles.

CAPSMaps
A map and surface image system that enables visualization of the locations for all of the databases listed above as well as several other databases developed by CAPS.