Pretty good response

Last week's post about cleaning up our data pertaining to the location of AEDs in Lincoln got a pretty good response. A couple dozen AED registrations followed, and a few photos of AEDs in their context were added by users as well.

Several of these updates were made using PulsePoint AED, the free smartphone app made specifically for the purpose of collecting information about where AEDs are located in the community. Over the weekend, a big article by Erin Andersen in the Lincoln Journal Star gave a perfect example about how an AED in the workplace saved a life.

I'm certain there are more AEDs out there we don't have registered, though, and plenty of photos that could be collected using the handy "add photo" function in PulsePoint AED. Is one of them at your workplace?

PulsePoint AED is a companion app to PulsePoint Respond, which we hope to launch later this year in Lincoln. If you've followed my blog for a few years, you know that I've been interested in the technology of location-based services, which has been a frequent topic here. I can think of few other examples of how this technology can improve public safety than PulsePoint. Here is a short piece from ABC World News Tonight earlier this year that explains why:

You can help

PulsePoint is coming to Lincoln. In preparation for its launch, we have been working to improve the accuracy of the database about Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs). Lincoln Fire & Rescue maintains a registry of AEDs, and this is the source for the location information needed by PulsePoint. People who manage facilities can register or update the information about their AEDs at LF&R's website using a simple online form. Registration is actually required by State law.

Ordinary citizens, however, can also help us--if they use an Apple or Android smartphone. Here's how: download the free PulsePoint AED app. Whereas PulsePoint aims to notify citizens of cardiac arrests in public places near their current location, PulsePoint AED is designed to crowd-source information about the location of AEDs in the community. Data collected via PulsePoint AED is fed to PulsePoint Respond.

If you see an AED in Lincoln, open the PulsePoint AED app to check if it shows up on the map. If not, tap the plus sign to add it. You can also use your smartphone to take a snapshot of the AED. We'll double check the data, approve the submission, and within a short time it will be added to the map. If you see an AED that is already on the map but lacks a photo, take one and submit it. Try to take the photo with a little of the context around it, like the one below in the lobby of Hall of Justice.

We know there are lots of AEDs out there that we don't know about. We also suspect there are others that have been moved, or been retired. We'd really like to clean the data up, so we can maximize the chance that citizen-rescuers can find a nearby AED in the event of a cardiac arrest.

Screenshot from my iPhone

Sounds familiar

That was the subject line of the email sent to me last Friday by Zach Pluhacek, reporter at the Lincoln Journal Star. The content of his email was simply the link to this Thursday article in the New York Times. The reason the story sounded familiar to Mr. Pluhacek is because he had authored this Friday article 2½ years earlier.

If you've followed my blog a bit, you know that I'm interested in the mobile data technology and specifically location-based services. An idea that popped into my head while visiting Los Angeles in November 2009 morphed into a 2010 grant from the National Institute of Justice to develop a location-based services application for police. The application, built by a small team of developers at the University of Nebraska Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was originally named P3i, Proactive Police Patrol Information. It is now branded CrimeView NEARme, as the developers have commercialized the product in collaboration with the Omega Group. The app is available for Windows, Android, and iOS. Lincoln Police Officers are using it laptops, smartphones, and tablets with all three operating systems.

It is interesting to see that the New York City Police Department has followed suit, piloting a smartphone app designed to deliver similar information to their officers in the field. The description of Officer Donaldson using the information available at his fingertips in the article will ring very familiar to Lincoln officers, who are quite accustomed to operating like this. Here's one difference, though: Officer Donaldson entered the address of the building in Harlem in order to bring up the information he sought. In Lincoln, that step would be unnecessary for an officer using NEARme, because it is a location-based service. The icons representing points of interest (like the addresses of arrest warrants, parolees, recent crimes, or sex offfenders) simply appear on a map based on your device's current location, beckoning your finger to tap for further details if you are so inclined.

Police officers equipped with timely and relevant information in the field can work far more effectively, efficiently and safely than when such information is back at headquarters buried in cumbersome programs or on paper. During my career, Lincoln's police information systems have moved from file cabinets in the Records Unit, to terminals on desks, to laptops mounted in patrol cars, and now to tablets and smartphones in the palm of your hand. It has been a dramatic shift that I saw coming long ago, has now gathered momentum in the rest of the country, and will shape the future of police information technology.

LBS for community corrections

For the past couple of years, I have been very excited about the technology known as location-based services.  CrimeView NEARme (formerly known as P3i), invented here in Lincoln, is my best example of the value LBS has in policing.  Location-based services, however, have potential value in government far beyond this application, and so far, the surface is only being scratched.

Very early on, I thought that an LBS application could be very valuable for people who work in community corrections, such as parole officers. Here in Lincoln, we have offenders supervised on parole, probation, furlough, drug court, house arrest, work release, and pre-trial release. We also have over 600 registered sex offenders, whose addresses are subject to verification.  The total number of clients is about 3,700 at any given time, but has been growing as more offenders are released from incarceration.  Employees of the State Department of Correctional Services Parole Administration, Lancaster County Alternatives to Incarceration, and the State Probation Administration are all responsible for clients in these various community supervision programs.

It seems to me that an application like this would be very helpful to, for example, a parole officer with a case load of clients with home, school, and work addresses, around the community. When in the field, the officer would see these addresses presented on a moving map, not only improving routing to scheduled visits, but providing opportunities for other unscheduled visits to addresses that happen to be nearby.

Maximizing contacts with parolees, probationers, drug court clients, could improve the utilization of limited field supervision resources.  More contacts also are helpful to clients, encouraging their compliance with the conditions of their release, and reducing the chance of their relapse into unlawful conduct. Our research here in Lincoln has clearly demonstrated that the technology results in more contacts and attempted contacts with wanted persons by police officers, and there is no reason to doubt that the same impact would not occur if this technology was available to community corrections.

Bounce house?

I must lead a sheltered life. Why, I didn't even know what a slug was! My most recent confusion occurred last week, while I was demonstrating CrimeView NEARme (the app formerly known as P3i) to some colleagues. I was showing the audience the functionality of the search feature, and entered an address in San Diego. Here is the Bing Maps image that popped up:

I had no idea what that was, but it looked like one of those inflatable bounce houses, only of the gigantic variety.  No doubt it is just me, and everyone else realized instantly what this striped structure really is.

On the horizon

I was in Kansas City Monday and Tuesday meeting with a group of police and public safety managers who were invited to see some of the best emerging software technology for geospatial analysis.  Some pretty amazing developments have taken place in recent months.  I was particularly impressed by a product from Azavea, HunchLab, which uses science-based statistical analysis to anticipate such phenomenon as crime hot spots, burglary risk, and future service demands.

I believe Azavea and the Omega Group are doing some work together, and I foresee that this could result in some good things being incorporated into the CrimeView products LPD uses so effectively.  I also got to see some of the new features coming in the next release of CrimeView Dashboard, one of which, Spatial Notes, really caught my eye. It's similar in concept to the location-aware bulletins we are implementing in NearMe (the application formerly known as P3i).

Location-aware bulletins

Lincoln’s ground-breaking LBS application for police, P3i, has gone commercial.  The University of Nebraska’s research commercialization program, NUtech Venutures, has helped the UNL developers form a marketing arrangement with the Omega Group, makers of CrimeView, a popular suite of GIS and crime analysis software products for law enforcement.  The Omega Group has rebranded P3i as CrimeView NEARme.

Prior to this roll out, developers Ian Cottingham and Kevin Farrell added a few new features, one of which I am particularly intrigued with: location-aware crime bulletins.  Among the products the Lincoln Police Department’s Crime Analysis Unit produces are printed crime bulletins. These are usually one or two page documents meant to inform officers of an emerging crime trend, a series of related cases, a new criminal enterprise, a specific suspect, and so forth.

Lincoln is not unique in this regard.  This is a bread-and-butter product of crime analysts all around the country, and documents of this type are thumb-tacked on police bulletin boards world wide. More recently, many departments have begun distributing such bulletins as .pdfs on their Intranet.

While crime bulletins come in a variety of flavors, many relate to a specific geographic area.  Our Crime Analysis Unit Manager, Andrew Dasher, observed one day that a location-based services app like P3i would be a great way to deliver such content to officers in the field: as you entered the area where the bulletin information was relevant, a link would appear on the map, and a click would open the bulletin alongside the map. The developers ran with that idea, and here’s what the result looks like, on the Windows version of CrimeView NEARme:

Police iPad advice

Apparently if you Google the terms "iPad" and "Police", a couple of my past blog posts are near the top, concerning my own experiences using an iPad as a tool in my job.  As a result, I get an occasional contact from other police & fire types on this subject.

Friday, a captain at a small department emailed me.  I'm not sure if he is comfortable with me naming the agency, so for the moment, I won't.  He had attended my presentation at a conference earlier this year, and had gone home determined to look into equipping his staff with tablets.  It appears he found a funding source, and now has 14 Apple iPads on order. He was looking for any advice or tips.  Here's my reply:

That is awesome! Congratulations. Here are my top three applications: 

1. Google Maps.  A good, current street map that follows you around, aerial photos if you need them, and street-level images.  You have good StreetView coverage in your town, and this works great on an iPad.  With 14 units, you could actually set up Google Latitude and create what amounts to an AVL system for your department--you'll all be able to see where one another are on the map.  This is how my family keeps track of me.  

2. The Apple web browser is Safari, and the iPad version is preinstalled.  Think of any website that you and your colleagues find useful on your desktop computers. If you have an Internet connection, you'll be able to access almost all of those same sites on the iPads. There are a few web components that do not work on iPads--sites that use Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, for example, but this is pretty minor.  One of the cool things you can do with an iPad is to take any bookmark you've set in the browser, and create it as an icon on the desktop. Stuff that you use often, like the sex offender registry, state statutes, state inmate locator, and any other websites can be set up as a one-click icon on the screen.  

3.  Any documents that you want to deploy--procedure manuals, handbooks, telephone contact lists, etc.--can be loaded up in iBooks, as .pdf files.  I've got a ton of these, and it works really, really well for arranging all those printed documents we're used to carrying in a three-ring binder!  If you get yourself a free Dropbox account, you can store the master documents in a shared folder, install the iPad Dropbox app on each iPad, and this would be a great way of distributing new or updated .pdfs.

I take it from your email that you are getting the WiFi only iPads, rather than the 3G model.  If you have a wireless network at the office, schools, home, etc., you can connect to those whenever you are close enough, but to really get the maximum value out of your iPads, you're going to need that Internet connection when you are on the move. A mobile hotspot like a MiFi or Overdrive wireless hotspot would be the solution, as you note.  One problem with that is that you then have another battery to go dead. Be careful when you go shopping for your mobile hotspot, and try to find one that will continue to transmit and receive while connected to the charge cord--some do, some don't--and make sure you've the cell provider you select has good coverage.

You'll have some work ahead getting fourteen iPads set up and activated, and some ongoing administrative work keeping application updates current. This isn't difficult, it's just going to require a little time now and then.  You can lock those iPads down in lots of different ways, to prevent users from accidentally deleting applications, or buying applications, or installing stuff, or using certain features like youtube, videos, iTunes, in app purchases, and so forth. 

I've got a post on my personal blog about some of my favorite apps:
http://lpd304.blogspot.com/2011/01/police-ipad-update.html 

Best,  

  Tom Casady  

P3i for Duluth

Duluth’s a nice place, I’m sure, but my only recollection of spending a month there one week during March several years ago is being pelted with horizontal freezing rain for about three straight days.  I was travelling with Jane and Steve, colleagues from our local domestic violence shelter, Friendship Home, and Lancaster County Adult Probation.  We were attending a training/planning session on improving our community response to domestic violence, taught by the renowned Ellen Pence.

Oh, wait, there was that lovely restaurant north of the City on the shores of Lake Superior.  Ellen sent us there, with instructions to ask for a specific server, Zoe, and to inform her: “We are here to end violence against women.”  A meal to-die-for ensued.   But I digress….

Chief of Police Gordon Ramsay and I have become acquainted over the past couple of years.  We’ve talked about various issues over the phone and email.  He reminds me of me, and I suspect its mutual.  Chief Ramsay is very interested in leveraging technology to work efficiently, and he learned of P3i via my blog.  We have offered to bring Duluth onto P3i during the remainder of our research grant, and we are working on that right now. Like Lincoln, Duluth is a customer of the Omega Group and crimemapping.com, and like me, Chief Ramsay is a big proponent of crime alerts as a means of keeping citizens informed about crime in their own back yard.

Looks like the Chief is both a new blogger, and writes a column for the local newspaper, the Duluth Tribune. That’s great public outreach, and I wish him well in the blogosphere.  It’s a challenge to keep up with fresh posts, but the pay off is huge when you let the public inside your office to see what’s on your mind. 

Different perspective

I had a speaking engagement yesterday morning at a local service club’s breakfast meeting.  I spoke to the group about some technological changes that are impacting the 911 Center, Lincoln Fire & Rescue, and the police department. Among the topics, I told the group about our new location-based services application, P3i.  I explained that I was encouraging officers to get to know the parolees and registered sex offenders on their beat.  I think this both helps in their supervision and encourages their own self-control. 

An audience member just flat disagreed, and during my presentation she took me on head-to-head. She was quite adamant in disagreeing with this entire idea, and did not like this concept in any way, shape, or form.  I tried to steer the Q & A in a different direction, by explaining that if she doesn’t like the sex offender registry or the concept of parole supervision her issue was with the legislature, not me.  She would have none of it, though, and continued to opine in opposition quite stridently. 

It was a little uncomfortable (more so, I think, for the audience than me) but I appreciated hearing her perspective, and admired her persistence and her willingness to go against the grain.  She thinks forgiveness is important (me, too), and doesn’t like the idea of the police inserting themselves into the lives of past offenders in this way.  It is always good to be reminded that not everyone sees things the same.   

New blog

Andrew Dasher is the manager of the Lincoln Police Department's Crime Analysis Unit.  Drew has a new blog, locationbasedpolicing.com.  He is interested in engaging more of his colleagues in a dialog about the emerging technology of location-based services in policing, and the implications of this technology for police strategies.

I was really intrigued with his most recent post about a free geocoding and map hosting service, batchgeo. It amazes me what you can do these days with free products and services. Drew has published a sample map of a fictional series of auto thefts, to demonstrate the output from batchgeo. Click on one of the fake cases, and check out the cool label that incorporates an image.  I can write the string of html code necessary to create the labels in Drew's sample map, but this product automates that to a very easy pick-and-click step.  There simply is no reason any police or fire agency with the inclination couldn't be creating some useful GIS products.

Good luck with the blog, Drew.  This is certainly a topic that is gathering a lot of momentum in policing, and if you can stimulate some more discussion among crime analysts and policing practitioners, you will be performing a nice service to the professional field.

P3i picking up momentum

The Lincoln Police Department’s location-based services application, P3i (Proactive Police Patrol information) is getting a little more attention around the dial these days.  Since my blog post back on June 14, the first public unveiling of the concept, we gave gotten a bit of news coverage and a feature-length article in the Police Chief, one of the most widely-read professional publications in the field.

The video has been getting a lot of hits, and inquiries have been coming in from other organizations and departments in such places as Illinois, California, Texas, Washington D.C., Virginia, and Kansas.  As the project continues, the research & development team from UNL and LPD will be working on interim reports, articles, a and a book chapter.  Conference presentations are also in the works. This weekend, some of our officers are going to be showing P3i to a few parole and probation officers—a field that I think is particularly ripe for the use of location-based services.  I’m interested if they will see the potential.

The feedback I’m getting from external sources has included glowing words such as “revolutionary”.  We shall see.  Sometimes things look good in development, but fall somewhat flatter in the real world.  That’s the purpose of the research phase of this project, but I am cautiously optimistic.  Remember, though, that this is “Version 1”.  Location-based services applications generally, including P3i, will continue to become more polished as time passes.

During the first 45 days of the  launch, the application gradually dribbled out in small groups to what was eventually 60 officers.  During that time, they reported 504 contacts or attempted contacts that would not have occurred but for P3i, resulting in 65 arrests and 92 Information Reports.  We are well into the second month now, and we are now fully deployed for the test. The last of the applications (a web app for our mobile data computers combined with a USB GPS puck) was checked off this week.  We now have 75 officers in the experimental group who have P3i on one of five different devices.  Their feedback will be far more significant than the impression of anyone who has read an article, attended a conference presentation, or watched an amateur youtube.  The jiggling camera and rattle, by the way, an intentional--like reality TV.

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).

Location-based services

A location based service (LBS) is a data service delivered to a mobile device using information about the device's current location.  If you use a smartphone, you've almost certainly used a location-based service.  A common example would be a weather application.  You click the icon to open the application, and it returns the weather conditions.  You don't have input "Lincoln, NE" or "68508" because the phone already knows where you are, and reported those coordinates to the app, so it could deliver the information that is relevant to your current location.

Many mobile devices these days are location aware. There are a few different ways a gadget can figure out it's location. First, if it is a phone or has a wireless air card, the cell phone signal includes some location data. Your cellular carrier knows what tower the phone is communicating with and where that is located, and in some circumstances your location can be triangulated even more precisely because your cell signal is pinging multiple sites. Second, if the device uses WiFi to connect to the Internet, WPS (wireless positioning systems) could be used to determine it's location. WPS providers maintain large databases of the locations of Inteternet access points. Finally, the current crop of smatphones, many tablets, and a sack full of other gadgets now have integrated GPS, hence the ability to determine latitude and longitude by the signals of global positioning satellites.

There are tons of LBS applications available for the new generation of smart phones and tablet computers that are taking the mobile computing world by storm, and these kinds of apps have widely adopted by consumers.  This is how tens of thousands of people will find restaurants, bus stops, dry cleaners, and nearby ATMs today.  It is remarkable how quickly LBS apps have become integrated into the daily life of so many people. The increased computing power of mobile devices, the falling price of GPS receivers, and the proliferation of broadband data services has changed the landscape of mobile computing dramatically.

Location-based services have tremendous potential in criminal policing, emergency services, and community corrections.  I have a feeling that we're on the verge of something significant in these fields.  More on that later this week.

Research coming

During the past two weeks, we have been notified about two Department of Justice grant projects that we will be part of in the coming year.  The first is a grant to support the Lincoln Sexual Assault Response Team, a consortium of agencies working to improve Lincoln’s response to the investigation of rape.  The funds will allow us to start implementing a series of recommendations from a year long audit of sexual assault investigations that was undertaken over the past two years.

The second grant goes to the University of Nebraska, but we are a partner in the research.  This grant will allow us to pursue a unique technology initiative that is intended to provide police officers with information in the field in a new and innovative interface.  It’s an idea that jumped into my head last November, and a group of UNL researchers turned it into a National Institute of Justice proposal to bring this concept to reality and to study its impact. 

I am excited about both of these projects.  The first is going to help us do a better job on one of our most serious violent crime.  The second has the potential to make a groundbreaking contribution to the field of policing.