Partnering with the Police to Prevent Crime
Using Geographic Information Systems (October 2003, 48p)
The advent of geographic information systems (GIS) has given
behavioral scientists the
ability to map and track a wide range of social phenomena
in relatively small parcels of
urban space hitherto almost unreachable in an analytic sense.
Much more information
about what is happening “on the ground” is now
available. This enhanced analytic
capacity has presented public and private stakeholders such
as police departments,
housing authorities, school districts, neighborhood associations,
and corporate managers
with the opportunity to better serve and protect the people
and places in their care.
Furthermore, as GIS assists one in seeing and understanding
behavior patterns, it also
provides stakeholders with opportunities to join together
in partnerships for the common
good. This guidebook is about forming stakeholder partnerships
to prevent crime using
GIS.
In August 1999, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban
Development’s (HUD’s) Office of Policy Development
and Research published Guidebook for Measuring Crime in
Public Housing with Geographic Information Systems. The
1999 guidebook’s primary objective is to familiarize
the reader with the basics of crime mapping with GIS as they
could be applied to measuring the incidence of crime in public
housing developments. The 1999 guide suggested straightforward,
uncomplicated approaches to examining crime patterns with
emphasis on the serious offenses included in the Federal Bureau
of Investigation’s (FBI’s) Part I crimes. A number
of sample tables and some sample graphics were presented.
The 1999 guide can serve as a primer for a variety of stakeholders
who wish to employ crime mapping on a broad array of places
such as public housing developments, schools, neighborhoods,
privately owned apartment complexes or subdivisions of single-family
homes, shopping malls, or parks.
The primary objective of this guidebook is to suggest how
community stakeholders and police departments (PDs) might
go about forging crime prevention planning partnerships
(henceforth to be referred to as “CPPPs”)
based on crime mapping. Much of the information in this guidebook
is derived from recently completed HUD research that involved
the establishment and observation of CPPPs between public
housing authorities (PHAs) and their local PDs. However, we
believe that the knowledge gained in studying the creation
and operation of PHA/PD CPPPs can be applied to partnerships
between PDs and a wide variety of stakeholders.
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