Safe + Found
In the hands of first responders, geospatial applications save lives
In Washington, D.C., spring is a small miracle. After months of slate-colored skies, frostbitten fingertips, and slushy streets, the
Safe + Found
In the hands of first responders, geospatial applications save lives
In Washington, D.C., spring is a small miracle. After months of slate-colored skies, frostbitten fingertips, and slushy streets, the nation’s capital breathes an exuberant sigh of relief as its denizens exchange parkas for parasols and snow boots for sandals. Cherry blossoms paint the National Mall a bubblegum shade of pink, snow banks give way to sunbeams, and for a moment all seems right with the world.
At last, summer is on its way.
For District residents, it’s a blessing. For District police, however, it’s a curse, according to Robert Horne, the District of Columbia’s program manager for geospatial intelligence. “Crime seems to spike in D.C. during the summer,” he said. “Nobody wants to go outside when it’s cold and windy, but when it’s warm outside, people go out and commit crimes.”
Indeed, numerous studies have shown that when temperatures rise so does the crime rate. There are many reasons why, ranging from social—people congregate more in the summer—to physiological: Heat causes increased heart rate, blood pressure, and testosterone, all of which can make people more aggressive in stressful situations. Regardless of the cause, however, the effect is often violence, which is why the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department has organized a Summer Crime Prevention Initiative every year since 2007. Spanning May through August, the annual program mandates increased law enforcement in neighborhoods with the largest concentration of robberies, carjackings, homicides, and shootings.
To make summer streets safer for citizens, police leverage not only violent-crime detectives, who make more arrests, but also analysts such as Horne, who uses the District’s geographic information system to extract location-based insights about crime and criminals.
“The police department uses GIS to determine what areas, based on historical crime as well as current activities, it should focus its efforts in,” Horne explained. “We certainly aren’t the deciding factor in reducing crime—good police work is the deciding factor—but we help point good police work in the right direction.”
In fact, GIS and GEOINT are compasses that point all manner of public safety personnel in the right direction, including police, fire, and emergency medical services (EMS), helping first responders plan and execute missions more effectively, efficiently, and safely.
“Whether you’re talking about fire safety, crime, or quality of life in your community, public safety agencies are using GIS to get a better handle on it,” said retired chief of police Lew Nelson, director of Global Law Enforcement Solutions and Industry Solutions department manager for Esri.
Charts of the Future
Geospatial technology and law enforcement are perfectly matched, according to David Roberts, senior program manager in charge of the IACP Technology Center, through which the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) provides technology research and support to state and local law enforcement agencies.
“Everything in policing is location-based,” Roberts said. “It stems back to the earliest days of policing, when police had pin maps. Using pins on a map, agencies were constantly trying to interpret the contours of crime and criminality in their jurisdiction so they could determine how to best deploy resources.”
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is widely credited as the first law enforcement agency to recognize the power of geospatial information. It was 1990 and Manhattan was a scary, lawless place, more gritty than glamorous. Crack pipes littered the ground like cigarette butts, walls wore graffiti-like tattoo sleeves, and Times Square was better suited to criminals than tourists.
Crime was especially rampant in the subway, which fell under the purview of New York City Transit Police Lt. Jack Maple. Rather than focusing on response to subway crimes, Maple strove to stop them before they occurred. To do so, he famously used 55 feet of wall space to map every train and train station in New York City. In crayon, he marked every violent crime, robbery, and grand larceny that took place in the city. Eventually, he made more maps charting more crimes, utilizing a system of colored pins to help Transit Police visualize patterns and strategically deploy patrols to high-risk areas. Maple called the maps his “Charts of the Future,” and between 1990 and 1992, they helped reduce felony crime in the subway by 27 percent and robberies by a third.
In 1994, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani named Maple’s boss, William Bratton, NYPD commissioner. Immediately, Bratton deployed an electronic version of Maple’s charts of the future, called CompStat, which has been credited with reducing homicide, robbery, burglary, and car theft by 80 percent, 83 percent, 86 percent, and 94 percent, respectively, between 1990 and 2011.
“CompStat reporting is becoming very po