Problem Resolution Team app

Back in the mid-1990s, the Lincoln Police Department was diving into problem-oriented policing, which at the time was still a fairly new concept: instead of responding over and over again the the same place or problem, try to identify the underlying issues and work to resolve those. Several examples of such work can be found on my blog, by following the POP tag in the label cloud. Another great source for information is The Center for Problem Oriented policing, popcenter.org.

One of the early practitioners of problem-oriented policing in Lincoln was Capt. Jon Briggs, who commanded the Northeast Team at the time. Some of the problems his officers were working on required the assistance of other agencies, such as the Health Department, Aging Services, the Building & Safety Department, Animal Control, and the Law Department. Jon saw a real need to coordinate and collaborate across agency boundaries.

This need became a concept paper, which we presented Mayor Mike Johanns, and Lincoln's Problem Resolution Team was born--with Capt. Briggs as it's chair. In the ensuing 20 years, the PRT has become institutionalized in Lincoln, and several LPD managers have served as the chair. LPD Crime Analyst Char Estes provides the technical support, among her other duties. The team has experienced many successes in resolving chronic issues at problem properties, and today many other cities have similar inter-disciplinary teams of this type.

Longtime readers of this blog know that I am something of a minor league GIS geek. Every now and then I'll dive into a GIS project, which is an opportunity to work on something that requires an entirely different skill set than my normal job duties. This week, I spent several evenings working on a project for the PRT. With a little help from Jeff McReynolds, Lincoln's GIS program manager, I was off to the races in an effort to create a mapping application for tracking current PRT properties.

I used ArcGis Online to build a web mapping application that displays the location of these properties. A click on the icon brings up the details, including the most recent photo from the Lancaster County Assessor's Office, and a link to more detailed information about the property. I think it will be a nice tool for the PRT, and it's certainly a good example of the utility of ArcGIS online if even a GIS hobbyist like me can do it.

Many crime analysts read the Director's Desk, and most of those are involved in GIS work as part of their duties. If you have yet to explore creating web mapping applications, I suggest you do so. This is only one of many we use for a variety of purposes in public safety: CCTV cameras, parcel lookups, street finder, fire hydrant locations, fire pre-plans, P3i, stream gauges, and much more. Web mapping applications are ideal when you need a simple, single purpose application quickly.

A good starting point (other than visiting arcgis.com) would be to look around the GIS community in your own jurisdiction: the county assessor, public works department, parks & recreation, building inspections agency, and so forth. You may find that other municipal GIS technicians are already deploying web mapping applications, and can offer you some assistance in getting started.

What the heck?

I ran a series of posts a few years ago about unusual artifacts found around the police station. Well, this one wasn't physically around the police station, but it was on my computer monitor when I snapped this screen shot. Any guesses?

Get the app. Save a life.

We are launching PulsePoint in Lincoln today, a remarkable application that connects willing citizens with nearby emergencies where CPR may be needed. If you have the PulsePoint app installed on your smartphone, and you are within walking distance of a sudden cardiac arrest in a public place like a shop or restaurant, you'll receive an alert and directions.


PulsePoint is free. It requires no information from the user. All you is download it from iTunes or Google Play, and go through the iPhone setup or Android setup. I'm hoping to convince a few thousand people in Lincoln to do so in the next year. It can just sit there next to Angry Birds until the day it might help you become a hero.

If you're a law enforcement officer, firefighter, health care professional, Red Cross volunteer, or dispatcher, you should have PulsePoint. If you're a teacher, mechanic, bartender, or anyone else who carries a smartphone, you should have it too, because you may be the one who is in the right place at the right time to save a life.

PulsePoint is relatively new, but already in use in hundreds of localities. Reports of saves are beginning to trickle in from around the country. It is inevitable that more stories like this will continue to unfold:


Along with the CPR alerts, PulsePoint also has some other nice features: you can follow all the Lincoln Fire & Rescue dispatches, there is a toggle to monitor our public safety radio feed, and you can sign up for other kinds of alerts such as injury traffic crashes and fires. PulsePoint is tapping directly into the 911 Center's computer-aided dispatch system, so you are receiving these alerts at the same time or even slightly before the first responders.

Given our volume of cardiac arrests (and the fact that only a fraction of those occur in public places) the number of PulsePoint CPR alerts in Lincoln will be relatively small--a handful per month. But these incidents do happen, as these great local stories from earlier this year attests. There is always the possibility that you will be the person who is able and willing to help save a life.

iPHONE SETUP



ANDROID SETUP

Busy weekend looms

Thursday LPD hit 418 police dispatches, making it one of the busiest days of the year thus far. The Fourth of July is huge every year, but with the holiday landing on a weekend, it could be massive. LF&R had a brutal Forth of July last year with 87 runs total, but an incredible dump started around 10:00 PM: 26 incidents in two hours, including four working fires. It continued well into the wee hours of July 5th.

We're fielding extra fire & rescue assets this year, after sucking wind in 2014. That's probably a guarantee things will be relatively calm; sort of like washing your car on Saturday morning inevitably brings on an afternoon thundershower, while leaving it dirty guarantees sunshine.

LF&R's GIS analyst Phil Dush and Battalion Chief Eric Jones, spun up a web mapping application to provide personnel with an interactive event management tool. It's a nice upgrade from last year's inaugural version. Visualizing the Incident Action Plan on a map is very useful, and this will look great on the big screen in the command post.

Matter of preference, but the application can also be viewed within the framework of FireView Dashboard. One of the neat features of these web mapping applications is that you can click on any of the icons or symbols to bring up the details. It's a far cry from the flip chart taped on the wall and plastered with Post-It notes. Moreover, staff can view it on any Intranet-connected device: desktop, laptop, tablet, smartphone.

Suicide data part 5

This is the last post in this short series, consisting of 13 charts and two maps. I put all these data together last week for Lincoln's latest suicide prevention coalition, but thought it might be of interest to my blog readers. One of the benefits of posting projects like this on my blog is that it becomes a readily available reference later on. I can get to it quickly with a search, and if send others a hyperlink to the post if I get inquiries in the future, something that has proven quite useful to me over the years.

This final post is the only one that uses data for the past 10 years, rather than the past 20. I don't have geocoded Incident Reports until the late 1990s, so for these maps I used the past decade. The map of suicides simply shows that suicides occur in all parts of the city, with a concentration at the center in Lincoln's historic core.  This is also the area with some of Lincoln's highest population density, though.

The second map combines both suicide and attempted suicide. It also accounts for differences in population density by depicting the rate of these incidents, rather than the number.  Rate is calculated by counting the number of incidents within each of the 2010 census block groups, then dividing that by its population. The red CBGs in the center of Lincoln with high rates also have elevated rates for other kinds of social ills--violent crime, domestic violence, child abuse, drug offenses, registered sex offenders, and so forth. If you search my blog for the GIS tag in the label cloud, and scroll through eight years of posts, you will see many other maps that show a similar pattern.

An outlier, the triangular red area in south Lincoln just south of Highway 2, is a census block group that includes a concentration of moderate income apartments. The two larger orange block groups in northwest and northeast Lincoln are CBGs with comparatively small population denominators, so it doesn't take many incidents to impact the rate. You'll notice lots of yellow down in south Lincoln. Maybe there's something to this.  Click each map for a larger view.

Anniversary of a memorable case

I interrupt my current blog series on suicide data for a moment, to reminisce about one of the most memorable days in a few 40 year careers policing Lincoln. Ten years ago today, on the morning of January 14, 2005, Officer Scott Arnold and Sgt. Ken Koziol nabbed a serial bank robber culminating a rather incredible (but very short) special project. I was in my office glued to the police radio that morning, having a hard time believing what I was hearing--and then smiling from ear to ear.

This was without doubt one of the most noteworthy cases during my tenure as police chief. Intuition, initiative, good planning, and determination were all involved, along with some top-notch crime analysis, and a healthy dose of just plain good luck. If you are a crime analyst, a detective, a street cop, or a even a deskbound chief, it just doesn't get much better than this.

Here is the contemporary Lincoln Journal Star news story by Margaret Reist from the day of the arrest. A more detailed account, including a description of the analysis that supported "Rolling the Dice," appears in Crime Mapping Case Studies: Practice and Research, 2008, edited by Spencer Chainey and Lisa Thompson.

Geocoding crucial

The Director's Desk readership includes a lot of analysts and GIS aficionados. I'm going to geek out in this post, so unless you are among them, consider yourself forewarned.

Public safety analysts and technicians mine data from dispatch records, incident report, and other databases in order to work with these data in a GIS framework. The dots don't appear on the maps magically, though. The geocoding process uses software algorithms to convert the text description of an address into a point on a map. 

Geocoding is both art and science, and accuracy is important. If large numbers of events will not geocode, or geocode improperly, the validity of any analysis is compromised. It doesn't take much to throw things off, either, because geocoding errors are often not random. Rather, they tend to be systematic: the same address gets missed over and over, or a tiny error in a street reference file results in the same address getting incorrectly placed on the wrong side of a census tract boundary, evey single time. 

Because of this, accuracy of geocoding should be a top concern for those of us who manage GIS applications. The key is to understand what isn't geocoding properly, and to systematically correct as much of that is possible. You may not be able to prevent the occasional fat-fingered entry where someone inserted an extra zero in an address field, but if you can never properly geocode the street address of a local high school, you've got to figure out why and correct that. 

Here in Lincoln, we're geocoding a few hundred thousand police and fire incidents and dispatches annually. I watch the unmatched records closely, in order to monitor any consistent geocoding problems. So I was pretty pleased to see this geocoding history report for recent fire dispatches yesterday morning:

Hard to top that, in almost a thousand records that are updated twice daily. That's the Omega Group's Import Wizard software pictured in this screen shot, which manages the data import and geocoding from both police and fire records systems in Lincoln, in order to populate CrimeView and FireView applications.

My advice to analysts is not to be complacent even if you have a high hit rate. Keep an eye on your unmatched records, find the repeats, figure out why, and fix the problem whenever possible. 

Picture this

Sometimes a picture makes a point more succinctly than several paragraphs of text, or several minutes of speech. Last night the City Council was discussing a proposed bond issue to replace our public safety radio system and to spread our existing  fire & rescue resources out to four new stations in better locations. I was trying to inform the city council of the benefit or relocating the fire & rescue resources. Essentially, the bigger footprint reduces the number of address outside our reach in four minutes by 66%.

Pink polygons are the current four minute travel time coverage, and the new coverage area after we move to the four new locations. Dark gray background is the current city limits. Yellow dots are the 9,783 addresses inside the city, but more than four minutes from a station. This is a nice use for an animated .gif, even though the argument failed to carry the day.

Map app for iap

An Incident Action Plan (IAP) is a component of the Incident Command System (ICS), which in turn is a component of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). How's that for an alphabet soup? Trust me, that's a tiny glimpse into the world of acronyms surrounding NIMS. Essentially, an IAP is a written plan describing the objectives and tactics to be employed during a specific operational period of an incident.

This is the way public safety incidents of note are managed these days. This week, one of those incidents is Lincoln's municipal fireworks display, and it's associated sideshows, the Uncle Sam Jam. This is a big event, attracting upwards of 100,000 people during the course of the day. LF&R Battalion Chief Eric Jones and LPD sergeant Valerie Kinghorn have been doing the heavy lifting planning the public safety operations: schedules, assignments, equipment, contingencies, logistics, etc.--and the IAP.

Chief Jones did something interesting late last week, creating a mapping application that depicts the geographic components of the IAP. He used FireView Dashboard as the platform for the map. Maps are a common component of incicent planning, but this one is not on paper: it's interactive. You can zoom in and out, pan around, turn various layers on or off, and click here and there for more information. The purple polygon is the operational area, where the events will take place in and around Oak Lake Park. Click on any of these images for a larger view of the screenshot.

There are several subareas within the overall area, and a click on any of those purple notes icons to bring up a description of the area or the point associated with it. You can also turn on the aerial imagery, or activate a sub-window with the oblique view from Pictometry. Links within the application take a user to even more resources. It is a nice job of using GIS tools to help visualize an IAP.

This and that

Just a few things I found interesting from the second half of the week. Wednesday afternoon, Assistant Chief Normal Seals of Dallas Fire & Rescue was gracious enough to spend about an hour with us. While teaching in Dallas on Monday, an assistant city attorney in the class, Maureen Milligan, told me about DF&R's Mobile Community Healthcare Program--a type of community paramedicine program that we have been discussing a little in Lincoln for a year of so. Ms. Milligan arranged an introduction, Chief Seals suggested a phone call, so LF&R and DF&R got together on a conference call. Chief Huff, Division Chief Bonin, Battalion Chief Linke and I participated. It was quite informative, and Chief Seals enthusiasm for this was infectious.

Yesterday morning, the inbox had two lengthy complaints sent to the Mayor and copied to me and the police chief about topics that have dogged us for years: fireworks and panhandlers. Chief Jim Peschong and I divided up the responses: he got fireworks, I took panhandling. These are very frustrating issues, without easy solutions. Anyone who thinks we could simply start ticketing everyone for littering who is discharging fireworks in the street at the end of the driveway fails to comprehend how we would be savaged for this after the fact. Past efforts to crack down have been less-than-effective. And anyone who thinks the solution is to bring the Wrath of Khan upon 13 year-old kids with bottle rockets fails to understand the workings of the juvenile justice system.

Panhandling, like it or not, is not only legal, it is protected by the First Amendment. So sayeth the Supremes. The primary reason we seem to have so much of it in Lincoln these days is because people continue to drop money on the panhandlers, rather than better alternative of contributing to the non-profits in Lincoln that serve the homeless, poor mentally ill, and addicted. While we can arrest people for the illegal forms of panhandling, it's not as easy as it sounds (they straighten up when and cops are in view) and this doesn't necessarily solve the problem. I cited an example in my response of a man we have lodged in jail 238 times for such offenses, including six so far this month. An empty or nearly-empty cup would be far more effective than fueling his addiction with cash.

Yesterday afternoon I participated in a webinar concerning the New York City Fire Department's use of GIS technology for planning and managing events in the city surrounding the Super Bowl. It was quite informative, and much of what the largest city in the United States is doing in this regard is quite similar to what we have been doing for some time here in little ol' Lincoln. Seeing their operation made me feel pretty good about how we've leveraged GIS for public safety out here in flyover country.

One thing really well

Lincoln has a residency restriction for registered sex offenders who meet the definition of "sexual predator" in state law. Our local ordinance prohibits these offenders from living within 500 ft. of any K-12 school. The ordinance (9.16.250) specifies that this measurement is from the property line of the school to the property line of the parcel upon which the residence is located.

With some frequency, sexual predators subject to this restriction contact us trying to determine if a particular location is within or outside of the restricted area. They also contact the Sheriff's Office, the Parole Administration, and probably others trying to make this determination. It has always been a little tedious to do so, requiring a fairly good knowledge not only of the ordinance, but also a more-than-casual familiarity with the City's GIS viewer at its measuring tools.

It is now getting a whole lot easier. Andrew Dasher, the manager of the Lincoln Police Department's Crime Analysis Unit made a web mapping application yesterday, using ArcGIS Online. It is a application that allows a user to input an address, and quickly see whether it is within the 500 ft. buffer from nearby schools. While it's awfully good as is, he is in the process of working with Lincoln's GIS manager, Jeff McReynolds, to make it even better, so this app is likely to be slightly different in the future, and even more accurate.

Over the past few years, I've started to really appreciate these ArcGIS Online web mapping applications. They are easy to build (even a Director can do it) and quickly deployed. Previously, I used apps that contained dozens of layers and fulfilled many different purposes. Now I am drawn to simple applications that do one or two things really well. ArcGIS offers many templates, and web maps can be embedded in other sites.

We use one that is a very simple lookup for parcels, another that is a basic streetfinder, one that is a portal to the City's traffic cameras, another that locates Lincoln Fire & Rescue pre-plans, one that just looks up the correct police reporting district and zipcode for a specific address, and now this one--to discover whether an address is within 500 ft. of a school. A gallery of such web mapping applications (similar to Grapevine, TX), is a nice way of providing these tools either internally or to the public.

What might be useful

Yesterday, a member of the International Association of Crime Analysts posted a question on their forum:

"Currently, I do a report for the command staff and then several reports for individual divisions within the department that are geared toward that division only.  We are looking at continuing our command staff report, but then putting together a bi-weekly comprehensive report that includes USEFUL information.  Of course many of the things done now will be put in this report, but I would love some fresh ideas. I would like to hear your input on what kinds of reports and information you put out regularly that your department finds really useful.  So….what’s useful?  What just goes to the trash?"

I was going to respond with a few ideas, but decided a blog post would be more effective. In Lincoln, we use various methods for keeping our command staff informed, one of which is CrimeView Dashboard. Although I like this product, the purpose of this post is not to promote it. The concepts are not dependent on the software. We were trying to get this kind of information in the hands of our staff way before we adopted CrimeView. These descriptions may give you some ideas on what kinds of information might be valuable to police commanders. 

We organize these data into widgets, which reside on pages, which are within books--all electronic, and all updating automatically. The books are geographic: one for each of the department's command areas, and one that contains citywide data. Here's a description of the pages and widgets.

Current Trends Page
Widgets on the current trends in crime and dispatches. For example, this widget displays the workload trend in the past 14 days. Blue bars are calls for service,with the gray bars depicting the expected trend in the next 7 days, based on the past two years' history. The red line is the predicted trend line, which takes into account day of week variation:

Recent Crimes Page
Widgets for selected crimes within the previous 7 days. These are the kinds of crimes that are of particular interest in Lincoln, including gang-related offenses, retail business robberies, domestic violence, burglaries, thefts from autos, and this widget--drug-related crimes. The map is interactive: click on any icon for the details about that offense, or change the view from a map to a time-of-day chart, for example:

Persons of Interest
Widgets for the registered sex offenders, parolees, offenders on furlough from prison, drug court clients, gang members, and this one--registered sex offenders who have new addresses within the past week. Again the map is interactive, if you are in the app, you can click for the details::

Places
Widgets about problem places, including such things as recent crimes at schools, addresses where we have responded to party disturbances, and this widget--a graduated symbol map of places with four or more false alarms in the past 90 days. We do a lot of work aimed at reducing false alarms, and this widget shows you the problem places right away. If you were actually inside the app, instead of this screen shot, you could click on the maximize button at the top right to take the map full screen:

Wanted Persons
Widgets for people with BOLOs and arrest warrants, over various time period lengths, such as this one--arrest warrants issued in the past week. I am a big believer that keeping pressure on people with arrest warrants has a pay off. You can click one of those buttons at the top of the frame if you would prefer to see these data as a table, rather than a map:

Part 1 Crime
The current trend in Part 1 offenses, compared to the same time period last year. In this screenshot, the data is rendered as a bar graph by offense type, but in the actual app, you can click one of those buttons at the top left for a day of week chart, an interactive map, a table of the data, a time of day chart, or a temporal heat grid:

Special Interests
Widgets for several things not categorized elsewhere, such as recent stolen gun cases, liquor license violations, and this widget of assault on police officers in the past 4 weeks:

Another way we deliver information to commanders is through threshold alerts. This is a snapshot of the citywide alerts in CrimeView Dashboard. When the threshold is exceeded, the icon turns red and pulsates, indicating at a glance something out of the ordinary. Commanders are interested in emerging problems that might be lost in the sheer volume of daily activity. That's the purpose of these alerts. Only one of these (graffiti vandalism) had fired off this morning. You can click on this screenshot for a larger view that is more legible:

Volume and proportion

A question posted on the International Association of Crime Analysis forum last week caught my eye. It was by a detective at a municipal police department in Texas, who was trying to figure out how to create a map which would depict the relative number of thefts, burglaries, and robberies in each of his city's three police districts.

Since he wanted to do this using ArcGIS (something I'm pretty comfortable with), I replied to the list with my suggested method. I suspect crime analysts who lurk on the IACA list are somewhat shocked when a person in executive management responds with a solution to a technical GIS issue. I'm probably older than most of their fathers, too, but from time to time I like to remind myself that I can still do things like create pivot tables, hammer out a little html code, and wrangle a GIS project to make it do what I want it to do.

At any rate, this is similar to what he was trying to accomplish. It is a map of robberies in Lincoln from 2009 through 2013, depicted as five pies, one for each of the Lincoln Police Department's command areas. The differing size of the pies reflects the relative number of robberies within each Team, while two slices of each pie are business robberies and non-business robberies.

It's a simple graphic that at a glance conveys information about both volume and proportion. As you can see, the Southwest Team has a much larger volume of robberies, and the non-business slice is way bigger than most of the other teams. Basically, street robberies are the issue in the Southwest and Center Teams, while business robberies (though still fewer than non-business) are more prevalent in the Northwest, Northeast, and Southeast teams.

Click image to enlarge

For analysts wishing to create this effect with ArcGIS, take your polygon layer (in my case, the five police teams) and add fields for the pie slices and their values (in this example, business robberies and non-business robberies). Under "Properties" change the symbology to "Charts" and select a pie chart. A stacked bar chart would also work well with these data. There are other settings for various options, but you'll get the drift.

Most valuable perspective

I've just concluded a workshop presentation to several dozen colleagues from around the country on the value of Pictometry's oblique aerial imagery for public safety personnel, such as fire battalion chiefs, police officers, dispatchers and emergency management personnel. Many people are familiar with Pictometry images through Microsoft's Bing Maps. The public imagery available through Bing, however, is not the latest-and-greatest. In Lincoln, these are 2010 images, whereas the 2013 photos we use internally are more recent and taken at even higher resolution.

The workshop was at the request of Pictometry for their annual users' conference. Many of the municipal and county customers of the firm are such people as county assessors and city GIS managers. Apparently in some communities where the city or county have already spent the money to acquire this imagery for such purposes as tax assessment, it isn't necessarily being used by the public safety agencies.

To me, it is a no-brainer. Neither standard overhead aerial photography, nor street-level imagery such as Google's Streetview, quite fills the bill as well as the bird's eye view from Pictometry's oblique images. Whether planning the service of a high-risk arrest warrant, preparing for the potential of a significant working incident, or managing a large special event, the oblique aerial view is quite helpful, and provides the most valuable perspective.

I could sense the topic was timely. My session was well-attended by people who wanted some advice on how to engage their police department, fire department, sheriff's office, 911 center, and emergency management personnel. Many of the attendees wanted to talk in more detail after the session, and I spent an afternoon sipping coffee and brainstorming with people from Virginia to Colorado, and points in between. One of suggestions I made to these existing Pictometry customers was to download the iOS app for iPad, Pictometry Connect Mobile, then to simply hand that to a SWAT team commander or a bat chief. A picture is sometimes worth a thousand words, and these are personnel I would expect to be most likely to understand immediately how this technology could help.

Intentional omission?

A faculty member at Wayne State College that I met on this trip sent me a short email last week, linking this article about New York City's new online crime map.  NYPD must be about the last City of substance to publish a public-facing crime mapping application on the web (Lincoln started doing so in 1998.)

I had a look at the site myself, and several things impressed me. The performance was good. I liked the ability to visualize the data as a choropleth map ( precinct map), a continuous surface density map (the so-called "heat map"), and as graduated point symbols. I liked the statistics that pop up when you click on a precinct, and especially the comparative statistics that appear in the sidebar when you search for a specific address. It appears to be a location-aware app, judging from the GPS button at the top left, so I assume it will center itself on your current coordinates if you are using a location-aware device. The underlying base map is Google (if you doubt that, check out the point where West O Street crosses the Platte River.)

As noted by the critics, the app lacks any detail about the crime points, other than the incident type. At the bare minimum, I would want the date and time of occurrence, and the case number. I can imagine a precinct commander getting a call from the owner of a building who has noticed a nearby robbery and is inquiring about any details that the officer might be able to share. Without a case number, you'd be somewhat in the dark trying to figure out what case he or she refers to. If it were my patch, I'd be a bit embarrassed by that. Even if there was very little I could ethically or legally provide, there would at least be a few public record details that might be informative, and would prevent me from appearing to be clueless, or, alternatively, require that I turn to the internal system and try to match up the point in question with its case number.

Nonetheless, this is an attractive and functional app, and I'd say a good start. I just wonder what the discussions were that led to the decision to exclude time, date, and case number. I don't think that could possibly be a mere oversight; it must be intentional.

Wild west

One of my colleagues at the Lincoln/Lancaster County Health Department sent me this link yesterday, to a map application published by the Houston Chronicle. She knew I would be interested both in the subject matter--officer involved shootings--and the technique used by the newspaper in creating a simple and clever application with filters for querying the data. Making something like this would have been a huge and expensive undertaking just a few years ago. Now, you can do some incredible things in the GIS world quickly and with free or low cost software.

Many newspapers around the country are publishing web mapping applications, but this one from Houston is a particularly nice example. The Chronicle's embedded interactive map was created with ArcGIS Online, and uses the same template and style as several of the small, special purpose apps we deploy at the City of Lincoln for such tasks as looking up parcel ownership, accessing the City's traffic cameras, or displaying Lincoln Fire & Rescue pre-plans.

I used to build large GIS projects that included dozens of layers, fulfilled a myriad of uses, and had scores of controls. Now, I'm increasingly a fan of small, simple apps that do one of two things very well:  more simple, with fewer layers, buttons and controls. As a byproduct of this approach many of these apps work quite well on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones.

That's a lot of officer-involved shootings in Houston over a four year period. I realize that it is a huge metropolitan area, but still.... Is it just the size of the population? I wonder how the rate of shootings today would compare to the days of the wild west. I couldn't find a link to it, but several years ago I read an article describing research about fatal shootings in California during the gold rush of the mid-19th century. The researcher had gathered contemporary news reports, and using population estimates concluded that the rate of shootings was far, far higher than even the most violent contemporary cities.

No reason not to

I had a speaking engagement yesterday at the Lincoln Realtors Association. It's one of five I have this week, all with different topics. For this one, I told the realtors about the value of crimemapping.com, our public crime mapping application from the Omega Group. Of particular interest to real estate agents, I would think, is crime alerts--the feature that provides the ability to sign up for automatic email alerts when one of these selected crimes is reported within proximity to the address you have selected.

I know I've blogged about this on a few past occasions, but this is my annual push to remind as many people as possible that this services is available at no cost. I love crime alerts. I am subscribed to the area within 500 feet of my own home address, my son's home in Lincoln, and my daughter's home in Omaha. Even though I have plenty of access to the police records management system, I simply would miss some of these crimes due to the sheer volume of what goes on in Lincoln on a typical day, were it not for crime alerts.

Crime alerts are a great way to learn about crimes in your immediate surroundings. In my case, a little more awareness of the kinds of crimes that occur in my neighborhood has caused me to change two habits in a way that makes it less likely I will be a victim--again.

Sign up. Spread the word. If you live in an area covered by crimemapping.com, which includes hundreds of cities and counties, there is no reason not to.

When and where

Dr. Joel Caplan, a professor at Rutgers, and assistant director of that university's Center on Public Security sent out a request on Sunday for "expert knowledge" concerning the spatial aspects of assaults on police officers. He and his colleagues intend to produce a bulletin containing this "crowdsourced" information.

I didn't have a lot of time to devote to this, but Tuesday morning, I produced a little analysis of our data in Lincoln on assaults of police officers, dating back to 2001. There have been 826 such assaults as of midnight Monday. A healthy percentage of these (18%) have occurred at a handful of institutions:

72 Cornhusker Place Inc. (detox center)
42 Bryan LGH Medical Center West
19 Lancaster County Jail
7   Group hope for teenage runaways
6   Hall of Justice/Law Enforcement Center

Another 60 assaults occurred within two blocks of 14th and O Streets--the bar district in Lincoln that caters predominantly to the young drinking crowd.

We collect a two-digit location code on all crime reports, that describes the type of premise. Here are the premise types with 10 or more assaults:

181 Street
75   Correctional institution or treatment center
96   Apartments with 7+ units
74   Single family residences
64   Sidewalk
46   Hospital
30   Alley
30   Duplex
22   Tavern/bar
17   Public high school
16   Apartments with 3-6 units
11   Grocery store
11   Restaurant
10   County-City Building complex

There is not only a strong spatial pattern in assaults, but a very strong temporal pattern as well. From the map and the chart below, I think we can safely conclude that alcohol contributes markedly to the risk of a police officer being assaulted (click to enlarge).

Not quite as intense

Last month, I wrote a post called Micro-places in which I tried my own version of some research that studied how crime concentrates in very small places: in this case, a study of individual blocks in Seattle. My little project basically looked at the same thing in Lincoln, and showed similar results: intense concentration of crime on the "top blocks."

The post was certainly not my first about the geographic dynamics of crime in Lincoln, but for some reason, it got more attention than most, as evidenced by the online comments, and also by a few delivered to me personally. One of those came from a city council member, who correctly perceived that a lot of those "hot blocks" were in retail areas.  This is really pretty obvious when you think about it.  Many common crimes are related directly to retail activity (shoplifting, credit card fraud, forged checks, etc.), and many are related to the processes that bring people together in the same place at the same time: potential victims and potential criminals--something that happens naturally around busy retail areas.

The council member wondered if the picture would be different if I had excluded those retail-oriented crimes. I opined that it would, but I have my own formula for assessing such questions, something I call the "neighborhood well-being incidents." My 2004 intern, Becky Colwell, won a national student paper competition using this concept, which she named the "quality of life index." What Becky and I did was rethink the kinds of police incidents that most accurately reflect the safety and well being in a neighborhood.

Becky's paper describes this in greater detail, but in essence we thought that some crimes had very little impact: a fraudulent credit card swipe at the grocery, a shoplifted pack of cigarettes at the convenience store, a resident of the youth detention center assaulting a staff member.  Other crimes would more obviously influence the quality of life or the well being of the neighborhood: a residential burglary down the street, a child abuse in the apartment building, a drug arrest at the park, etc.. Using combinations of incident codes and location codes in the police database we excluded the kinds of crimes at places that seemed to have little relevance to well being, which in the process also emphasized those that do.

I ran the same GIS process as in my earlier Micro-places post, but this time filtering the incident and location codes using my neighborhood well being query. The resulting map is below, and a side-by-side comparison will show some similarities and differences. The key difference, though, is not really depicted by the map so much as the data. The neighborhood well being incidents are not nearly so concentrated as crime generally. Removing the retail and institutional crime reduces the intensity of the concentration. Whereas 81% of all crime was concentrated on the top 5% of the blocks, when only neighborhood well being incidents were examined, 49% of those incidents were concentrated on the top 5% of the blocks. That's still some major concentration, nonetheless. Some of that is simply a byproduct of population density, some is related to economic and demographic conditions, and since many crime types are integrally related to our automobile culture, traffic density is another important factor in concentrating crime along certain street segments.

How recent is recent?

Over the past decade, maps have become a common addition to news media websites.  As a GIS geek, I always appreciate a well-executed map.  Maps help me visualize data that would be, well, flat in a mere table.  I especially like interactive maps, the kind that allow you to zoom in and out, change the view, manipulate the data, drill into more detail and so forth.

For several years now, the Omaha World Herald has been using Google Maps, and more recently Leaflet, to produce several kinds of maps (and some other interesting data) on their website. Among these is a map of homicides.  This is what the map looked like Saturday morning.

The online version is interactive: you can click on an icon and get some details, including a link to a relevant World Herald story. The map is titled "2013 Omaha homicides," but there is no indication of its currency. One might assume that it presents the data as of the date of publication, but that is not the case. There is (understandably) a lag of several days before a new murder hits the map. The tabular data is presented below the map, so you can scroll down to see the most recent mapped murder and then add on any more that have occurred in the interim. The most recent murder on the map was on August 4th, so I added five more that are reported in the news since August 4th, but not yet mapped.

The Lincoln Journal Star also publishes many interesting maps, including a map of murders which appears in the sidebar of the "911 News" page.  This is what it looked like Saturday morning.

The map is labeled "Recent Lincoln Murders." There is no description of the date range, other than the term "recent." Like the World Herald map, there is also no description of the ending date, leading one to wonder, just how current is the map? You can click the icons on the LJS map and get the details and links, just like to OWH map, but unlike the Omaha map, you can't scroll down to take a look at the data presented in a table. So if you want to know the date range, you'd really have to click on each individual icon and keep track of the dates on a scratch pad.

I did just that, and determined that "recent" in the title of this map apparently means within the previous 12 full years, because none of the 2013 murders appears on the map, and the earliest murders mapped were in 2001. To be fair, if you took the link to "Large map," the title on that page would indicate "Lincoln murders, 2001- present." This is still not quite accurate, since the 2013 murders do not appear) but at least an indication that the map of "recent murders" starts in 2001. That's the same year that Apple introduced that fancy new-fangled device known as the iPod, which soon made your Walkman obsolete.

If you're a data hound interested in such things, it's hard to beat the Lincoln Police Department's online tool for generating your own statistical tables.