PowerPoint fatigue

I'm a little exhausted with lengthy PowerPoint presentations filled with annoying animations and transitions, too many slides, small fonts and lots of words.  In fact, I'm a little tired of computer presentations generally.  I point the finger in the mirror, because I've been as guilty as anyone. These days, my Keynote and PowerPoint presentations are shorter and contain fewer words than ever, and I've finally learned to ease up on the trickery in favor of subtle animation.

In fact, of late I have increasingly forgone the projector and computer entirely, and just talked at more events. Such was the case yesterday at Leadership Lincoln, where I was asked to present for about 35 minutes about public safety issues to a group of about 30 movers and shakers who are the fellows in the current class.  Rather than a collection of groovy slides, I handed out a sheet of paper with a few conversation starters, and let the audience decide what they wanted to have me elaborate on or explain.  I think my blog is evidence that I could do this for a long, long time before I drew a complete blank, but here's the little list I used yesterday.

• Of all the incidents handled by Lincoln Fire & Rescue, 76% are medical emergencies.
• Only about half of our ambulance billings are actually paid. 
• Lincoln is a great place to have a heart attack.  From the time our paramedics are at a patient’s side until the time blood flow to the heart is restored at a hospital is 67.9 minutes. The national standard is 90 minutes—but that is from the time the patient arrives at the hospital.
• Lincoln hasn't added a fire station since 1996. Since that time, we've added 50,000 citizens.
• 8,469 addresses in Lincoln are more than 4 minutes in travel time from a fire station.
• Lincoln Fire & Rescue is one of 28 Urban Search and Rescue Teams in the United States.
• There are 733 Gang members and 31 gangs known to LPD as of noon.
• Yesterday, among the 345 incidents handled by LPD were 22 traffic crashes, 6 assaults, 4 sexual assaults, 6 missing persons, 52 disturbances, 8 mental health emergencies, and 10 child abuse/neglect cases.
• There were 1,194 false fire alarms in Lincoln last year, and 2,384 false burglar alarms:  35 false alarms were at a single restaurant, but they were beat out by one other facility….
• Lincoln has 320 police officers, and is the smallest police department per capita in the State, 1.22 officers per 1,000 population.  The national average is 2.4 officers per 1,000. If we were the same size per capita as Omaha, we would need to add 172 officers.  To be the same size per capita as Grand Island, we would need to add 91.
• Google this:  “Lincoln police” GIS

Marathon weekend

The 36th Lincoln marathon and half-marathon this past Sunday was quite a scene.  I've enjoyed the event in many capacities over the years: as a half marathon runner a few times, a police officer directing traffic several years, a aid station volunteer a couple times, and as a spectator on every other occasion.  It's always been a top-notch experience.  Lincoln's marathon is run on a flat, fast course. It gets tons of community support and spectators line vast stretches of the course, with lots of encouragement, refreshment, and entertainment. As a result, it has grown phenomenally in recent years.  Capped at 10,000 entrants, this year's race was sold out within minutes of registration opening back in December.

Two years ago, Mayor Chris Beutler asked his department directors to come to our next weekly meeting with some outside-the-box ideas on how we could either reduce City expenses or increase economic activity.  I brought three ideas to the table: mothball Pershing Auditorium, reduce the number of streetlights burning all night, and repave the Boosalis trail along Lincoln's stretch of Nebraska Highway 2. My idea was to boost the width of the trail to eliminate one the bottlenecks during the marathon that clog the course, so we could up the number of participants.

I'm sure I wasn't the first or only person with that idea, but it is gratifying that it is now going to happen.  The marathon is a fantastic event for Lincoln, and creates a huge amount of economic activity, the subject of this article in yesterday's Lincoln Journal Star. Ramping the Lincoln marathon and half marathon up to 12,500 next year, and maybe even 15,000 thereafter will be a good thing, although it will also require more more logistics, and more emergency services.

The public safety team was meeting to consider the implications of the bombing at the Boston Marathon within a matter of minutes of its occurrence on April 15th.  The enhanced security efforts at this years' Lincoln marathon were considerable, and some of these will undoubtedly be incorporated into future events.  Hats off to Capt. Fehringer and his staff who did the bulk of the work coordinating the public safety response, but we got a big boost from some specialized military resources and from the Nebraska State Patrol's helicopter. Thanks to the police officers, firefighters, national guardsmen, troopers, soldiers, dispatchers, and volunteers who implemented the plan flawlessly.

P.S.  My favorite costume this year had to be the guy in the gigantic sombrero who was greeting everyone in Spanish, fitting for a race held this year on Cinqo de Mayo.  I'm sure the wind resistance from the head gear cost him several minutes!

Personal touch

I blogged last week a couple times about the police department's efforts to reduce false alarms, as a means of both using resources efficiently and improving public safety. One of the most effective tools in achieving this reduction was a redesigned municipal ordinance that increased the cost for chronic repeat false alarms. The pocketbook can be a powerful motivator. There is, however, another tool that has proven to be powerful  and one that I think is often under appreciated

Back in 2011, a home improvement store here in Lincoln had developed quite the reputation for their chronic false alarms. That year, Lincoln police officers responded to 19 false alarms at the business Apparently the escalating fines for more than 3 false alarms in a single year hadn't done the trick. But in 2012 and 2013, there has been a dramatic change. There has been one false alarm in 2013, and there were only two in all of 2012. A drop from 19 false alarms to two at a big box retailer is pretty astounding.  So, what changed?

The answer lies in the personal touch. Sgt. Ed Sheridan paid a visit to the store, and talked face-to-face with the manager. That was the turning point. I have a feeling that for some businesses the bill for excessive false alarm simply goes into the accounts payable stack along with the other monthly bills for pest control, lawn care, and garbage service. When you meet the right person and have a personal conversation, though, you can often change this dynamic.

You can let the manager know that this isn't just a matter of cost: responding to false alarms puts officers and the public at risk.You can tell the manager about your concern that repeated response to false alarms can lull police officers into a deadly sense of complacency. You can tell him or her about the police officers and firefighters right here in Lincoln who were killed during emergency driving. You can offer to speak personally to the firm's alarm company, or to make an appeal up the chain of command on the manager's behalf to a national or regional manager, if that would help get him or her the needed resources to solve the problem.

Engaging in this approach requires timely information about premises with emerging false alarm problems.  Lincoln's ordinance allows three free false alarm responses annually, before the fees kick in. We use one of our GIS applications, CrimeView Dashboard, to alert personnel in our five command areas of emergent alarm problems.  An automated query looks for addresses with three or more alarm dispatches within the past 90 days, then creates a widget that is displayed in the dashboard.  Although it appears on the dashboard automatically, you can drill into the data as far as you want with a mouse click. Here's what the false alarm widget displayed this morning for Capt. Anthony Butler and the Northwest Team officers:

This widget uses graduated symbol sizes and the number within the circle to immediately show the heavy hitters at a glance. It is a great example of using the power of geographic information systems (GIS) to deliver actionable information to police personnel.  We also have a significant problem with repeat false fire alarms. Beginning this year, these are also covered in Lincoln's ordinance. We are in the process of implementing the Omega Group's companion product for the fire service, FireView Dashboard, and I expect that repeat false alarms will be among the widgets we include on the dashboard for battalion chiefs and fire captains.

Consider the denominator

This is a follow up to my post Tuesday about the declining number of false alarms in Lincoln. A reader, Michelle, who is an alarm administrator for a Texas law enforcement agency, left a comment telling me that the industry standard for assessing false alarms in the ratio of false alarm dispatches to alarm systems. This makes sense. The denominator provides the context for comparison., just like population is used as the denominator to calculate crime rates.

There are 5,554 registered alarms in Lincoln, so last year's 2,383 false alarm calls would represent a ratio of .43. We do not know how many alarms were in operation in 2002, the year we reached our high of 4,848 false alarms. I think we can reasonably assume that there are significantly more today, because the population of Lincoln is more than 30,000 greater today, and it is also my impression that the number of alarmed premises has soared in recent years.

Lacking specific data on the number of registered alarm systems in 2002, if we just assume that the number of alarm systems was the same as in 2012 for the sake of this exercise, the ratio of false alarms to alarm systems would have been 4,848 to 5,554, or.87. If I am right about the likely increase in the number of alarmed locations in the past dozen years, that ratio would actually have been considerably higher than .87, thus the decrease in the ratio to .43 in 2012 would be even more dramatic.

From past comparisons, I already knew that false alarms in Lincoln are on the low side when population is used as the denominator.  I was curious, though, if the same would hold true using Michelle's ratio of alarms to alarm systems.  In her comment, she had mentioned the website of the False Alarm Reduction Association, faraonline.org, so I went there in search of any data of this type from other jurisdictions. It looks like the site has lots of resources, but most are for members only, and I wasn't quite ready to fork over $150 to get a peak right at the moment.

I did, however, find a document on FARA's site that sheds some light on how Lincoln's ratio of false alarm calls to alarms system stacks up.  It was this description of the winners of the 2011 FARA Achievement Awards.  The top award went the the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police, which reduced the false alarm ratio from .42 to .35 over a three year period. One of the runner ups, the Riverside, CA Police, was recognized for a four year reduction from .69 to .41.  With Lincoln's ratio standing at .43, it appears we compare quite favorably with the award winners. 

Spring delayed

It's been a cold, wet spring in Lincoln. I've lived here since 1967, and don't recall one quite like this. The flowering trees are just now starting to bloom, a month overdue. Monday, though, the temperature finally hit 80, and hope soared. Alas, here is the view out my back door this morning:

Slashed in half

I have been giving annual updates in recent years on the reduction in false burglar alarms in Lincoln. I neglected to do so in January, but I am catching up now. False alarms fell to 2,383 in 2012. We can now say for the first time that the number of false burglar alarms has been slashed in half (and then some) from the high-water mark in 2002.

Since every one of these involves at least two officers being dispatched and some emergency driving, this has had a significant impact not only on workload, but on public and officer safety. This appears to have been achieved without impacting the number of actual burglaries. There were 1,593 burglaries reported to Lincoln police in 2012, compared with 1,964 in 2002.

There is still a little room for improvement. Although the number of chronic repeat addresses has fallen even further (242 in 2002 to 45 last year), there are still a handful of places that rack up impressive records of repeat false alarms. One local restaurant, for example, had 35 false alarms in 2012, and paid $6,000 in fees. That's a lot of onion rings.

Beginning this year, we are including false fire alarms in the ordinance. A false fire alarm is an even riskier proposition than a false burglary alarm, and consumes even more resources. It is a bit too soon to evaluate this, however, since it has only been in effect for a few months, and since the number of alarms is smaller. You can bet that I will be watching the data, though.

Easy maps

I wrap up the series this week of "quick wins": tips for a new crime analyst, looking for some projects that can be spun up fairly rapidly and at low cost.

Maps are useful for visualizing crime, which explains why police officers have been sticking pins in maps since the early 19th century. The human eye is a powerful instrument, able to discern information from a map that would be far more difficult to conceptualize in a list, table, or stack of paper. These days, geographic information systems (GIS) enable some very sophisticated analysis and visualization. Jessica, the new crime analyst at the Grand Island Police Department, understands this, and it was her exploration of GIS software that caused her to contact me in the first place.

Implementing GIS for crime analysis is a very worthwhile undertaking, but will require some significant time and resources.  In the meantime, though, some simple yet useful maps can be produced using free and easy tools. This has changed dramatically in the past few years. For a new analyst who has yet to acquire the software and training she will need for geographic analysis, these free services could be used in the interim to produce some simple maps of interest to officers.

Two good examples are cartodb and batchgeo. These services let users drag-and-drop tabular data that contains addresses onto a webpage, which geocodes the data and produces a credible map in a matter of seconds. The free version usually has some limitations to encourage you to spring for the pro version (such as the ads in this sample), but the free service could still have a new analyst producing a useful map or two every week.  As an example, I went to the Fargo Police Depaartment's website, screen-scraped the dispatch data from April 1st, dropped it into batchgeo, and created this map in less than five minutes of traffic crashes on April Fool's Day in Fargo. It's interactive: pan, zoom, try Pegman, click on an icon.



View April 1 Crashes in a full screen map

You can also build maps for free with Google My Maps, ArcGIS online, and others. You could make a quick map, take a screen shot, and paste it into a bulletin, or onto a PowerPoint slide to provide a visual cue to officers to go along with the text.  In Grand Island's case, they can create basic maps within their records management system, and they already have a public-facing crime map, as they participate in crimemapping.com from the Omega Group.  

Like any other Ciy whose data is published to crimemapping.com, Grand Island officers could download the CrimeView NEARme app for Android or iOS, and have a pretty useful tool even though it would be displaying the public crimemeapping.com data until and unless they signed up for the real McCoy. Those data, even though mighty basic and cleaned for public consumption, still have some value to police officers.  

The Series:

Impromptu visit
Weekly slideshow
A place of your own
Better bulletins
Easy maps

Better bulletins

This post continues this week's series on some tips for a new crime analyst.

The crime bulletin is a bread-and-butter product for the crime analyst. We all create them. You know the drill: you're the only person at the PD who actually reads all the reports every day. During the process you find interesting intelligence, uncover links between cases, develop potential suspects, and find patterns and trends before they become well known. When these findings have a broad audience of interest in the department, you commit the information you've gleaned to print, perhaps supplemented with a graph, chart, map, or photo, then copy your publication to stuff into the mail cubbies.

What I want to do, however, is to build a better bulletin by following four steps. First, KISS.  Keep it simple, seriously. Bulletins should be short. Two pages is usually one too many. Three is way too many. There may be a place for an analytic report of greater length, but a crime bulletin ought to be something you could read while standing at the urinal. Fewer words and more white space makes for a better bulletin.  If you use graphs and charts, make sure they are easily understood. This is the Achilles heel of many crime analysis products that are just too obtuse. The acid test is to hand the graph to your teenage daughter and see if she can tell you what it means, without any knowledge of the subject matter whatsoever. You'll find hundreds of graphs and charts in my previous blog posts, and most will be mighty simple.

Second, create a brand. Find a logo you like. Make a masthead, a header, a footer, a text box with disclaimers, confidence and sensitivity level, distribution restrictions, your contact information, or whatever you wish to include, but avoid unnecessary and redundant clutter.  Create a template with these elements. Use that consistently on all your bulletins. You'll find lots of examples on the website of the International Association of Crime Analysts (IACA), which, by the way, you should definitely join. For $25 per year, it's well worth it for the listserv alone, which buzzes with tips and solutions.  IACA has great publications, training of all kinds, fabulous resources for members, a certification program if you are so inclined, a fine annual conference, and more.

Third, optimize your bulletins as electronic documents.  Think of your bulletins as more than a piece of paper and supplement the printed word with interactive content.  My blog is a good example.  Most posts contain several hyperlinks that provide more information or supplement the text. Publish your bulletins in Adobe Acrobat portable document format, the ubiquitous .pdf. The Adobe Acrobat reader is free and as near universal as you can get. When relevant, build hyperlinks into your bulletins. This is easy to do in word processing or desktop publishing software, and your officers will know what to do with the blue underlined text in an online .pdf.

Posibilities for links abound.  Tag your name in the footer as a link to your email address. Tag addresses in your bulletin to Google Maps or Bing Maps to that precise address, with or without StreetView or Bird's Eye View. To do so, open the map and navigate to the spot you want. You can turn StreetView on in Google if you wish, or Bird's Eye view in Bing.  Look for the link icon in Google, and the Share button in Bing, and copy the URL. Next, highlight the address text in your bulletin, and paste the URL as the hyperlink. The text will be a blue hyperlink, just like all the links in my blog. Does your bulletin contain an out-of-state license plate number? Find a photo of that State's plate on the web, copy the URL and turn that plate number blue! While your at it, highlight the vehicle type and link to a beauty shot of the particular make and model. Here's a tip: most free .pdf distillers will not preserve the hyperlinks when you convert the .doc to .pdf. The full version of Adobe Acrobat works, but CutePDF (my favorite freebie) does not. If you use "save as .pdf" in Microsoft Office 2010, the hyperlinks will be preserved. OpenOffice also preserves hyperlinks when the document is saved as a pdf, and it is free.

Fourth, create an online repository of crime bulletins. It should be a link on that Intranet page you built yesterday, with the bulletins themselves parked on the same server. There are several benefits. You will have a chronological archive for future reference ("Wasn't there a bulletin about something similar a few months ago?").  You will save a tree or two. You will be able to email the hyperlink to the bulletin, rather than choking the pipe with a large attachment going to several dozen addresses.  You will be able to search the archive. The search mechanism can be quite simple. When you create the HTML page listing the links to the bulletins, include a title and keywords. Then, a user can just use CTRL-F (that's Edit/Find from the browser's menu) to search for the keyword.  It might look something like this:

The Series:

Impromptu visit
Weekly slideshow
A place of your own
Better bulletins
Easy maps