COEUR d'ALENE - Liz Peterson and Sara Cummings each sit in front of a dual-monitored computer at the Coeur d'Alene Police Department headquarters, using software to sift through and try to make sense of crime that occurs in the city.

The two women make up the department's Crime Analysis Division. Their goal is to reduce crime by giving officers the information they need to respond quickly to crime trends.

"A lot of these tools are used by Sara and I for analysis," Peterson said. "We can look at data and ask 'Why did something happen?,' 'Where did this happen?' and then 'What can we do about this?' Maybe it's additional patrols or creating new neighborhood watches."

In December the division added another tool to its arsenal - a powerful piece of software that, according to Chief Ron Clark, will make the jobs of officers and those in the analysis unit more efficient and effective.

• One program, many possibilities

From her desk at the Crime Analysis Division, Peterson quickly maneuvers through the CrimeView program. A series of mouse clicks cuts through the otherwise silent office as she builds a layered, multi-faceted map that showcases the power of the software.

The mapping system lets the team use multiple sets of data to create a visual representation of crime. If, for example, Peterson wants to see if there was a relationship between automobile burglaries and vehicle theft last year, all it takes is several clicks and a few seconds before the information is displayed on the map.

"It gives you a geographical aspect to crime and the ability to visualize what's happening and where." Peterson said. "And it's going through about 40,000 incidents in the city that occurred last year (to build the map)."

Prior to getting the new software, Peterson said the process of mapping crime involved running a query through a database, then exporting the results into another program where points would be mapped out.

"Here, you can just click back and forth and it's there," Peterson said. "There's a lot of possibilities."

CrimeView also enables the analytics team to set up threshold alerts, which look at the number of times an incident occurs in a selected period of time and then sends an email alert to officers. Officers on the street then have the information they need to focus patrols on a given issue.

"The purpose (of purchasing CrimeView) was to essentially give us an advantage in effectively keeping track of what's going on with criminal activity in our city," Clark said. "That program gives us an excellent resource to do that and we will be able to allocate resources to deal with the criminal activity it identifies early and quickly."

• The big picture

CrimeView was purchased as the first phase of a larger initiative. This initiative, called the North Idaho Regional Information Sharing Program, is funded by a grant awarded to the department by the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security in 2013.

The ultimate goal of the program is to form a multi-regional collaborative effort that will give smaller law enforcement agencies access to analytical information they otherwise would not be able to afford.

Cummings and Peterson will be at the forefront of that effort.

"It's a challenge and every day is something different," Cummings said of their work in analytics. "But it's nice to see the results of what you put together. Those results are very rewarding."