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).

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.

P3i for public

Our new location-based service application, P3i (Proactive Police Patrol information) is now in the Apple iTunes store and the Android Marketplace.  The public version is just like our internal police-only version, except the data available to the user is different.  For the general public, it is a sanitized subset of police incident reports in the past 30 days: crimes like burglary, theft, robbery, vandalism, and assault—with the exact address and personal identifiers redacted. 

You will be able to see the incident reports of this type near your current location as you move(within Lincoln), based on the GPS position reported by your device.  The app will give you some insight into the capabilities the officers have with the application and you can imagine the full-fledged police-only data that displays on their devices.

On a related note, the Omega Group, our longtime crime mapping software vendor, has recently released a mobile version of crimemapping.com for iPhone.  The app is very similar to the public version of P3i.  Just as with the regular browser version of crimemapping.com, you can sign up for Crime Alerts—something anyone who lives in Lincoln or any other community served by crimemapping.com should definitely do.  I’m subscribed to my own address in Lincoln, and to my daughter’s in Omaha, and even though I swim in the stream of police incident reports and daily briefings, I often find out about crime in my own neighborhood through Crime Alerts. 

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:

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. 

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.

At the summit

Wednesday I was in attendance at the Nebraska Digital Summit, a gathering of government technologists at the Embassy Suites here in Lincoln. I attended a few breakout sessions, and enjoyed some time rubbing shoulders with a diverse group from many other fields. In the afternoon, I was one of three speakers in an hour long plenary session that followed the TED format--in other words, fast--a lot of information stuffed into 18 minutes.

My topic was location-based services in public safety. I demonstrated the LBS application for police that we invented here in Lincoln, P3i, which is now commercialized as CrimeView NEARme, then I talked about several other uses for location-based services in police, fire, and EMS service. Interestingly, the second speaker, who followed me, spoke about the same topic in a broader context: how LBS applications are rapidly becoming ubiquitous in many fields.

We have a couple other location-based services applications in the wings here in Lincoln's public safety agencies. The Emergency Communications Center and Lincoln Fire & Rescue are doing some preliminary work to spin Lincoln up on PulsePoint, an application that provides information about sudden cardiac arrest incidents occurring in public places to nearby citizens who may be able to hlep. We are also experimenting across all agencies with a location-based emergency alerting service, Ping4Alerts.

Like my fellow presenter, I think LBS will continue to be a dominant theme in information technology, as the mobile device becomes the primary way in which we all consume content.

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).

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.

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.   

Skunked again

Every now and then, I still like to pretend I'm a real cop.  Last night before going home, I was in my office perusing data in CrimeView NEARme (the app formerly known as P3i), when I clicked on a nearby arrest warrant. It was issued for a California sex offender who had moved to Nebraska and failed to register.  We had begun investigating the case back in April, and a warrant was issued on July 20. There was nothing in the reports, however, that showed any activity on the case since the warrant was issued. Sometimes ships pass in the dark, and I wondered to myself if the investigating officer realized that his case had finally turned into a felony warrant.

I made a phone call to Sgt. Ryan Witzel, for the purpose of suggesting that he and his Center Team officers might want to check out the address, and determine whether our felon was still around.  Sgt. Witzel, however, told me he had just received an email from the original investigating officer.  He pulled the email up, and read it to me.  The felon, it appears, had been arrested on July 21st by a fugitive task force in Kansas City. I complimented Sgt. Witzel on clearing the case four days before I called.  Drat, skunked again.

Good things in small places

Kevin Sands is the police chief in Waverly, Virginia. He heads a department of seven in his small town. Waverly is a far more typical police force than Lincoln. In the United States, 90% of police agencies employ fewer than 50 officers, and half employ less than 10.

I met Chief Sands and his sergeant, Willie Richards, in San Diego last week, where I was unveiling our new location-based services application to a national audience of police technologists. Waverly and Lincoln shared a conference session. I presented about P3i, then Kevin and Willie followed with a presentation about how they are using Apple iPads to bring some great information technology to their small force.

Just as I have found a lot of uses for my iPad at work, so has the Waverly Police Department, and they've leveraged the applications very well, equipping their officers with some resources that would be the envy of big-city cops. Kevin had a nice set of Keynote slides demonstrating a variety of applications they are using for everything from language translation to report writing. Willie has hand crafted some very clever vehicle mounts with an articulating arm, by grafting together parts from a couple of sources.

I was impressed, as were others. There is a tendency to look towards large agencies for innovation and in research in policing.  I am convinced, however, that lots of great ideas bubble up in small agencies which have a key advantage over the big cities: they are more agile. Small agencies, though facing plenty of challenges, can often turn on a dime and implement innovative ideas quickly and well. By comparison, the big agency has a tougher time responding to change or opportunity.

There is probably a sweet spot at the nexus between large-enough-to-have-resources and small-enough-to-be-nimble. That's a good place to look for innovative and creative work, but don't ever count out the small places like Waverly, Virginia.

Real time crime

One of the presentations I saw last week in Kansas City was an interesting web tour of the Real Time Crime Center at the Ogden, Utah Police Department.  Using a webcam, the center's manager gave us a tour of the facility, and showed us the kind of work they do.  It is described well in this video:



Ogden's information resources are rather similar to Lincoln's, with the exception of their much larger network of recorded CCTV cameras, and their broader implementation of license plate readers.  Still, most all of the information mined by the center and sent out to officers is readily available in Lincoln, and then some.  Their approach is interesting: a group of officers back at HQ who both perform the same functions as our Crime Analysis Unit, and who can also grab information and try to get it out to officers in the field quickly when officers are dispatched to priority 1 and 2 calls.  They essentially watch the dispatch queue, and react proactively to assemble supplementary information they think would be valuable to the officers who are responding, and ship that to the officers' mobile data computers.

Lincoln's approach is a little different: trying to make the same kind of information available to officers in the field, either with push technology, location-based services, or in interfaces that are simple enough for rank-and-file patrol officers to use effectively.  Recently, we've been experimenting with a few two-person patrol units--essentially turning the patrol car into it's own mini-version of a real time crime center. Our location-based services application CrimeView NearMe (P3i), is another example of this approach.

I think both of these approaches has merit. Ogden staffs it's center with four full-time employees, one civilian and three sworn--quite an investment of personnel in a City of about 85,000 population.  If you had the same ratio in Lincoln, with 258,000, that would require a dozen staff.

The story behind PulsePoint

I blogged earlier this week about PulsePoint, a remarkable application that uses location-based services to deliver CPR alerts to nearby citizens who could potentially be rescuers. There is an interesting back story to PulsePoint, by it's founder, Richard Price.

He tells the full story in this 12 minute TEDx, but here's the condensed version: he's the fire chief in San Ramon Valley, California. One day he's grabbing lunch at a deli when he hears sirens approaching. One of his own rigs ultimately pulls up right outside the deli and the crew jumps out and attend to a sudden cardiac arrest in the shop rnext door. Had he known about it, he could have been there almost immediately and rendered care to the patient until more help arrived.

The experience made Chief Price think about how he might be able to use the concept of location-based services to notify willing citizens of these events when they occurred in public places nearby. CPR by a bystander is critical to improving the odds of survival. Perhaps the geo-aware feature of the smartphone could harness the good will of many who would gladly help save a life if the opportunity presented itself.

This is a brilliant application of location-based services, and one that has and will continue to save lives. Interestingly, Chief Price had this thought at about the same time,as I did, back in November of 2009 when the concept of P3i jumped into my head as I used Google maps to navigate to the nearest craft brewery in Los Angeles on a business trip.

Two chiefs, same idea, both in need of some iOS and Android developers. One was a pretty good idea for its time, which was at the dawn of the modern smartphone. The other was a genuine life saver. Doubt that? Google "PulsePoint saves".

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.

Made me think

Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor at Temple University in Philadelphia, is among my crime analysis/GIS pals.  We met about a dozen years ago, "networking" after a conference session. Jerry is unusual in is field, in that he has a decade of experience as a police officer at the London Metropolitan Police before he moved on to academe.  Dr. Ratcliffe maintains a personal website that is chock-full of great stuff.  He also has a wicked sense of humor, and the best presentation style--bar none--I've ever seen.

I had the opportunity yesterday to attend a session Jerry presented at the National Institute of Justice's Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety conference.  His topic was the impact of crime theory on police practice, a topic that staved off writer's block for me during an entire week of bloging a few years ago.  He focused on routine activities theory, rational choice theory, crime pattern theory and the types of police strategies that flow from these theories of crime: crime prevention through environmental design, situational crime prevention, geographic profiling.  

It was a good session, primarily review for me, but he said one thing in particular that piqued my interest and, made me think,and caused me to reach for a pen. When discussing rationale choice theory,  Dr. Ratcliffe opined that criminals do not often consider the risk of apprehension, rather are usually concerned only with the immediate escape.  So true.  This observation suggests that investigating crimes with an eye towards clearance after-the-fact, whatever it's merits, is unlikely to cause criminals to stop and reconsider their actions before they commit the crime.  Strategies that create the appearance or reality that immediate escape will be difficult, on the other hand, can effectively prevent crime.  This difference has some clear strategic implications.

My own presentation at the conference will be later this morning, concerning our new location-based services application, P3i.  I also had a great opportunity to discuss our current fire station relocation study with another friend, Bruce Silva from the Omega Group.  We buy the CrimeView family of products from his firm, but they also market a suite of similar products for fire departments, named FireView, naturally.  Bruce is quite familiar with fire operations and data, and confirmed my feeling that our current study is headed down the right path.

Impulse purchase pans out

In technology terms, 2010 was a long time ago. Back then, I was an early adopter of the original Apple iPad, and quickly found that it was a useful device at work. I admit it: I have a problem with gadgets. My smartphone habit goes way back to the Palm OS, and my handheld organizers even earlier. I had made up my mind, though, that there was no way I was buying an Apple Watch. And then....

A couple Sundays ago, I accompanied my lovely wife and daughter to the mall in Omaha. Ugh. There's nothing for a man there, and only a couple options that won't cause downright pain. I debated, then zigged left to the Apple Store, rather than zagging right to Scheel's. I found myself ogling Apple Watches instead of bicycle accessories and fly rods. 

I suppose I was ripe for the picking. I've always been a watch-wearer, and the Apple Watch proved to be less bulky in person than it looked in photos. The friendly associate said, "You should try it on." I swallowed hook, line, and sinker. A few minutes later I stumbled out the door, dazed, carrying a little white bag. They just make it too doggone easy. 

After a couple of weeks, I actually like my impulse purchase. It's great to get notifications on my Apple Watch of incoming text messages and emails. I don't have to dig for my iPhone. I can discretely glance at my watch during meetings without disrupting things. At home, my iPhone can stay on counter or plugged into the charger,  but I can still get check my emails and messages while puttering in the garage or out on the deck, or just kicked-back across the room.

I've only answered one phone call on my Apple Watch. It worked fine on both ends of the call, although I was alone in a quiet room at the time. I was hoping no one would walk by and see me channelling Dick Tracy. (How badly does this reference date me?)

The Apple Watch experience has me thinking about more sophisticated public safety applications for wearable technology. At one time, I thought Google Glass might be a breakthrough in this regard. Now, I think the smartwatch has good potential for doing things like delivering the patient's vital signs to the paramedic's wrist; or the tornado warning, the wanted bulletin, and the critical incident alert. I can see the potential of location-based information like that served up from P3i,  delivered to the user on a wearable device.

It's not just a pipe dream. I already have an application that sends notifications to me about certain types of major incidents. I get the alerts to my iPhone and now on my Apple Watch, too. It tickles my wrist to let me know of an emergency response like this one on Wednesday, and it usually does so several seconds before the 911 center has even been able to say the words on the radio necessary to dispatch the responders to the incident. You'll be hearing more about this on my blog and in the local news in coming weeks.

Emerging leaders

I do a good deal of public speaking, to all sorts of groups. This week, though, I had a particularly challenging gig--an hour with the current class of Youth Leadership Lincoln, a group of 40 high school sophomores, selected to participate in this intensive leadership development program. I enjoy high school and college students a lot, and I am quite comfortable with these audiences. The challenging part was the topic: technology.

Think about it a minute. I'm a 58 year-old, talking to a group of 15-16 year-olds about technology. I told these future leaders about ALPR, the proliferation of video surveillance systems, the impact of technology on criminal investigations and personal privacy, and our ground-breaking location-based services application, P3i. No problem, I had nothing to worry about in retrospect. The hour flew by, and we could have talked all morning. I guess I can still hold my own in the constantly-connected crowd. But I still won't tweet.

Nebraska 511

Seasoned readers of the Director's Desk know that I've had a longtime interest in location-based services: applications that deliver useful information to users based on their current location. Good public safety examples include P3i and PulsePoint. With winter weather beginning to set in, it would be a good time to remind folks about an excellent app from the Nebraska Department of Roads: Nebraska 511.

The Department of Roads travel information website, Nebraska 511, has been around for many years now, and has developed quite nicely. There is a full-featured version of the website, a streamlined version, and a version optimized for small screens. But there is also a mobile application designed specifically for smartphones, available in both Apple and Android flavors.

The mobile version has evolved a lot in recent years, and the current version is very slick indeed. It's great for checking road conditions, traffic in the metro areas, and for peeking at the large network of traffic cameras on Nebraska's highway system.

Next time you're taking a trip, try the "Tell me" feature--which will alert you to road closures, construction projects, and traffic incidents which are near your path.

On a mission

A comment on my post yesterday about public safety mobile applications mentioned a forthcoming app called GeoParade.  From the information on the website, and on the developer's blog (Canadian crime analyst Joseph Glover), it appears very similar to the "Missions" function in the Omega Group's CrimeView NEARme, the application that was born here in Lincoln as P3i.

Missions are user-defined areas to which information of interest is attached. As a police officer moves into one of those areas, the background color changes, and an information icon appears.  Here's what a Mission area looks like in CrimeView NEARme, along with the details that open with a click on the label.

Lincoln's Crime Analysis Unit Manger Andrew Dasher created this Mission yesterday, in response to a recent spate of burglaries that pop up in Lincoln from time to time.  The whole concept here is location-based services: delivering information to personnel in the field that is relevant to their current geographic location, using a map that stays centered on that location by taking advantage of the GPS capability of the device.

Mr. Glover's blog is about a year old, and has some gems for crime analysts and data hounds.  I really liked his tutorial on creating heatmaps in Excel, a technique I think does a particularly good job for large datasets with strong temporal patterns.