Vermont Crime On-Line State of Vermont | Vermont Department of Public Safety | Division of Criminal Justice Services

Vermont Crime On-Line (VCON) allows you to view standard crime reports or create your own custom reports instantly on-line.

VCON is very easy to use once you are familiar with a few basic operations.

Icons used in "Getting Started" and the VCON site

• Report Icon
• Create New Report
• Folder
• More detailed data exists

Viewing Standard Reports

To view a standard report simply click on the Report Icon from the Public Report Page. Click on this link to go to the Public Report Page now.

NOTE: The VCON site defaults to the most current year for which a complete year of data is available. To learn how to see data from other years please refer to the following link: Date Selection Instructions.

Creating New Reports

To create a new report, please review the VCON tutorial. Flash tutorials are available on the following topics:

• Creating a new report
• Saving a report
• Organizing Folders
• Selecting Dimensions and Members
• Arranging Dimensions
• Downloading
• Applying Calculations
• Sorting
• Ranking
• Top/bottom Reduction
• Highlighting Exceptions
• Drillthrough

To go to the Flash tutorials click on this icon located at the right side of the tool bar on the Public Reports page. NOTE: You must have a copy of Adobe Flash loaded on your computer in order to run the tutorials. You can download a free copy of Adobe Flash from the following site: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

Before starting the tutorial take a moment to review the following navigational buttons which control the tutorial. These buttons are located on the bottom right side of the tutorial screen.

Return to the Beginning
Go Back
Go Forward
Pause
Skip Forward

Slide Bar - You can move to any point in the tutorial by moving the slide bar with your mouse.

If you want to end the tutorial, move the slide bar all the way to the end or click on the icon on the tool bar.

CREATING NEW REPORTS: DATA SETS

As the "Create a New Report" tutorial explains, one of the first steps in creating a new report is to select a data source for your report. VCON provides twelve data sets from which to build reports. The data sources are displayed in the sample screen below.

Each of the data sources provides a different set of variables from which to build a report. For example the “NIBRS Crime Report Overview’ provides a limited number of variables such as crime location, offense type, date of offense, and reporting agency.

On the other hand the “NIBRS Victim Data” set provides the same data that is contained in the “NIBRS Crime Report Overview” but also includes an extensive list of variables which describe victims of crime including the age, gender, race of the victim, injury information, crime location, defendant information, and the nature of the relationship between the victim and the offender.

It is recommended that users familiarize themselves with the variables that are available from each of the different data sources in order to fully utilize the full capacity of the VCON system to analyze crime data.

Use the following links to go to the VCON Public Reports menu. From this page you can either view standard reports or click on the "Create New Report" icon () to create a custom report instantly on-line.

Vermont Crime On-Line (VCON) - Public Access | Law Enforcement Access

CREATING THEMATIC MAPS

Thematic maps are color coded maps where different colors represent differences in the amount of crime in different jurisdictions. For example, the following thematic map available from Vermont Crime On-Line (VCON) depicts differences in overall reported crime by county. Counties with a lower number of crime incidents are depicted in blue while counties with a higher number of crimes are depicted in red.

You can also produce thematic maps by town, by State Police station area or by State Police Troop area.

To create a thematic map you must first create a report in VCON. See the preceding section entitled "Creating New Reports" for details on how to create a report. There is also a Flash tutorial available on how to create a new report. To go to the Flash tutorials click on this icon at the right side of the tool bar on the Public Reports page.

Once you have created a report, simply click on the globe icon in the middle of the toolbar on the report creation page.

In order to create a map, your report must include jurisdiction information and a count for only one other category. For example, you can create a thematic map for the number of burglaries (one category of crime) by town (jurisdiction), but you cannot create a thematic map for the number of violent vs. property crimes (more than one category of crime) by town.

When the map is rendered on the screen a tool bar will appear to the left of the map as depicted below:

When you scroll your mouse over each toolbar icon the function of the icon is displayed. You can use these tool bars to modify, print, and save the map. Tap the for detailed help.

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