Crime mapping
Crime mapping is a technique used in crime analysis that utilizes geographic information systems (GIS) to visualize the distribution of crimes based on various factors such as time, location, and type. Primarily employed by police departments in urban areas, crime mapping aids in making informed administrative and staffing decisions, providing actionable data to law enforcement officers, and keeping citizens informed about criminal activities in their neighborhoods. The practice has historical roots dating back to the 1820s, with early examples demonstrating the connection between crime and social factors like education and poverty.
The use of crime mapping has evolved significantly since its inception, particularly gaining momentum in the 1980s alongside advancements in computer technology. Modern applications of crime mapping, such as the New York Police Department's CompStat program, exemplify its role in crime reduction strategies, leveraging GIS data to identify patterns and propose targeted interventions. Crime mapping encompasses various analytical approaches, including tactical, strategic, and administrative crime analysis, each serving different purposes in understanding and addressing crime trends. The core function of GIS within crime mapping is to link diverse data sets to generate informative visualizations, including single symbol, graduated, and chart maps, which enhance the decision-making process for law enforcement and community stakeholders alike.
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Crime mapping
Crime mapping is a crime-analysis technique that employs geographic information systems (GIS) technology to chart the distribution of crimes according to time, place, and type, primarily in urban areas. Police departments increasingly use crime-mapping software to make administrative and staffing decisions, provide reliable and pertinent data to officers in the field, and allow citizens to stay up to date with criminal issues in and around their neighborhoods.
Overview
Crime mapping has a long history, dating back at least to the 1820s in France. In 1829, geographer Adriano Balbi and statistician André Michel Guerry developed a choropleth map to gauge the relationship between levels of education and crime. The concept of mapping crime and linking it with coordinated data, such as education level or population density, expanded to the British Isles in the middle of the nineteenth century and reached the United States at the beginning of the twentieth. Early instances of crime mapping in the United States most famously include the work of sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, who mapped the addresses of male delinquents in Chicago in order to draw conclusions about the effects of crime on communities, promoting the theory that poverty and the lack of social organization were primary causes of crime.
Modern crime mapping was implemented on a wider scale in the 1980s, following the advent of desktop computer technology, and has been enhanced by the development of increasingly advanced computer software. Computer-based crime mapping surged during the 1990s, thanks in part to government funding, specifically from the National Institute of Justice, which funded the Drug Market Analysis Program (D-MAP). The New York Police Department created and implemented the CompStat program, which takes an integrative approach to crime reduction, relying on GIS technology to map crime and using the resulting data to form hypotheses about the causes of crimes and develop programs aimed at eliminating those causes. Other major US cities, including Los Angeles and Washington, DC, also use the CompStat template.
Crime mapping has increasingly been regarded as an independent field of study due to its widespread use in modern crime analysis. However, it is technically a subdiscipline of crime analysis and has various applications. In tactical crime analysis, crime mapping is used to detect short-term crime patterns, such as clusters of burglaries; in strategic crime analysis, it helps in the analysis of criminal behavior in a geographic region over long periods of time; and in administrative crime analysis, it provides a way to disseminate information to the public as well as to officers.
The spatial analysis of crime is the primary function of GIS-based crime mapping. GIS allows for the linking of disparate data within specific geographic regions and generates maps that provide intuitive methods of data analysis. Generally, GIS produces three types of maps: single symbol, graduated, and chart.
Bibliography
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