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Illegal graffiti is a form of vandalism and a major concern in many municipalities. It pollutes the public space, creates insecurity and costs a lot of money and resources to clean up. One way to face this growing problem is to report all graffiti to the police immediately, recommends BRÅ, the Swedish crime prevention council. In Norrköping, the handling of graffiti cases has been simplified and sped up through a smart system integration that helps the administrators to fill in the form for the police report.
Olle Classon, administrative manager in the municipality of Norrköping, explains:
– We have a policy of reporting all graffiti cases we receive to the police, and it used to be quite time-consuming. But with the help of Infracontrol Online and FME, an integration and automation tool, our administrators now receive active support when filling in the notification form. In addition to it being easier, it is also significantly faster to report to the police. We estimate the time saved for each case to be as much as 10 minutes.
Valuable support for administrators
Case management in Infracontrol Online means that each case quickly ends up with the right person to rectify it. In the case of graffiti, the cases are sent to the companies that manage the municipality’s graffiti clean-up. But it is also important to quickly report every case to the police, which is why Norrköping has simplified the reporting through a smart solution.
The new function to support the municipality’s administrators when reporting graffiti cases to the police has been tested since last summer and has been shown to both simplify and speed up the process significantly, with a time saving of about 10 minutes per case, says Olle Classon :
– The handling is straightforward because the function is event-driven. It is automatically activated when the administrator puts a case in the category “Cases to report to the police”, and you are then supported to fill in the form with the help of FME, an integration and automation tool.
The function requires authorization, so only the right certified person can make the police report.
Important data is saved
Olle Classon further explains that since information about the position is included in the case, you automatically get the correct street address. The information is collected for future analyses:
– Data about the report is saved in a map database, so we can easily obtain maps showing where graffiti is reported. It provides the opportunity to produce graphic summaries that facilitate the planning and implementation of various measures.
More opportunities to simplify
The function for reporting to the police is integrated with Infracontrol Online, which also provides great opportunities to simplify the actual reporting of graffiti. The service supports the creation of apps for specific areas, such as illegal graffiti or vandalism.
– With the camera and GPS position functions on mobile devices, we can get clear and accurate information in every case, which makes it even easier and faster to create a police report from the case in Infracontrol Online, says Olle Classon.
It is easy for administrators to report a graffiti case to the police directly in Infracontrol Online’s case view.
