The blog entry below contains excerpts from ‘Putting Virtual “Boots on the Ground” – Law Enforcement Gets Intelligence on Demand,’ originally written by Caron Beesley and published on

If you are a law enforcement official, you’ll understand the power of geospatial imagery as an essential enabler of location and terrain intelligence gathering. But while traditional satellite imagery and GIS systems provide invaluable situational awareness capabilities, they don’t always provide all the answers. For one, traditional geospatial imagery is orthogonal, i.e. “a top down view”, which flattens the landscape and gives no perspective, making it tricky to gain a true representation of terrain or buildings – after all it’s hard to pre-plan a mission or understand potential risk factors about a structure or location when all you see is an anonymous tiled roof and vague perimeter.