Antwerp is the largest town in Belgium with a population of 512.000 inhabitants. The Antwerp area includes one of the largest ports in the world and the highways around the city are among the busiest in Europe. The city has two universities, a hall where international events are organized and a world Trade Centre of diamonds.
The Belgium integrated police is structured on two levels, the federal component and the local component. The personnel of the local police force of Antwerp consists of 2200 police officers and 440 civilians. To serve inhabitants, workers and tourists there are units who respond to emergency calls 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week and there are 19 police-offices spread over the area whereof 6 offices are open 24-hours-a-day, seven days a week for the public. To accomplish the goals of community policing the force has invested strongly in neighbourhood policing to reduce nuisance. The neighbourhood police works in partnership with all kinds of agencies and local communities.
The criminal investigation department focuses on offences which are pointed in the strategic plan “Area Safety Plan 2013 – 2016”. The priorities are drugs, violence against persons, offences against properties (burglary), offenses committed by youngsters, domestic violence and nuisance.
The force has invested over the last 4 years in deploying the concept of information led policing on the strategic, tactical and operational level. One of the major investments was the implementation of a data warehouse (Police management Information System) to support all decision levels in the organization. The data warehouse is built on a Cognos platform. On the neighbourhood level, a custom .NET application is used for case management. The investigation department uses also a .NET application as a tool for case management. For strategic crime analysis the force uses SPSS and MapInfo, while operational crime analysis is performed with the assistance of the i2 Analyst Notebook application. Also various other systems are used for interoperability with higher levels and for specific services. All local police forces in Belgium are obligatory to use ISLP (Integrated System for Local Police) for capturing basic police data. These data are sent every day to a national database called ANG (Common National Database).
intelligence led policing – strategic and tactical intelligence