Proactive Police Patrol information

Proactive Police Patrol information (P3i) is a location-based services application that we have developed and deployed at the Lincoln Police Department  in collaboration with the University of Nebraska and with funding from the National Institute of Justice (the research arm of the Department of Justice.)

Last fall, the University was awarded a grant to develop and study this technology.  I am the co-principal investigator on this project, and I posted a teaser about it last September.  Within two weeks, there was actually a functioning version of the application. In the ensuing months, it has been through many more iterations, as our collaborators at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering have continued to enhance and improve P3i. Deployment began on May 4, and P3i is now in the hands of 60 Lincoln Police officers, who are using the application on four different devices: iPhones, iPads, Motorola Xoom tablets, and Droid2 smart phones. There will 15 more around the end of the month, when a version of the application that can be used on our regular mobile data computers (Panasonic Toughbooks) should be ready.

P3i works the same way many other location-based services apps.  It's a map-based application that displays the "police points of interest" around you, based on your current coordinates. The map moves with you as you walk or drive, and the points simply stream towards you as the map scrolls. If you are using it on a smartphone, when you pull it out of your pocket, its already centered on your location.  The points of interest represent the locations of recent crimes, the addresses of parolees, registered sex offenders, people with arrest warrants and so forth.  These data are updated daily. We use very similar data in our internal mapping applications, so the process was already in place to automatically gather and geocode these data from our reporting systems for display in a geographic framework.  With P3i, we have moved these data to the street as a location-based service. Just as you might use Google Maps or Bing on a smartphone to search for a restaurant, then click the icon to bring up a photo, a link to its website, and a button to launch Streetview, you can do all the same things in P3i.  Rather than the restaurant, though, it's the sex offender who lives in the corner house, or the guy in apartment 201 with an arrest warrant that you might not have known about without this technology.

The early word on P3i is encouraging.   I've been in this business long enough that I think I am familiar with  sound of sucking-up-to-the-chief.  The reaction I've been hearing from officers is something quite different.  UNL's Public Policy Center is in the process of conducting research, though, to shed some light on how this technology impacts policing and police officers.  At the end of the day, I am pretty confident we will have data that reflects on efficiency and effectiveness, not just anecdotes (although we've already got a bag-full of those, too).