With the recent 2019/20 unprecedented bushfire emergency, NSW Police Force was expected to provide a holistic view of NSW bushfires to the Royal Commission and related Coroner’s inquiry. In the past, reporting on bushfire related crime (such as arson or death related to a bushfire incident) has been challenging and time consuming due to no single source of truth for bushfire related criminal activity and information, limited state-wide view of bushfire related incidents with many information silos residing in datasets within an array of Government Agencies.
With the 2019/20 NSW bushfires, there were some 2,000 Police reportable bushfires that required investigation which had significant volume of data and evidence to be reviewed and analysed by detectives.
To tackle this problem, NSW Police has leveraged Strikeforce Tronto (the strike force investigating bushfires) to introduce digital capability for bushfire investigations across NSW. We’ve launched a minimum viable product to better manage and visualise all bushfire related data. This new analytics and geospatial product has improved the strike forces’ ability to view data from multiple sources and conduct investigations more efficiently in a highly graphical, user friend and intuitive way.
This has significantly improved utilisation of investigators time and reduced the search time from weeks and months to minutes. This new service has led to a significantly quicker identification of police reportable fire affected properties in NSW and enabled more efficient investigations management processes to support detectives on Strikeforce Tronto. Furthermore, it has also enabled pro-actively managing persons of interests, identify and link similar patterns in fire related data, and an interactive dashboard for Police reportable fires across NSW.