CrimeMapping.com

We have a new option available to the public for mapping crime in Lincoln. CrimeMapping.com is a brand-new site created by the Omega Group for its clients. Right now, it has data for Lincoln NE, Duluth MN, and High Point NC--but this will undoutedly grow as more agencies participate.

The Omega Group is a San Diego-based provider of GIS services to police departments, fire departments, and school districts. We've been using their services and products since October, 2000. This latest addition uses a new approach: a synthesis of the carefully-geocoded data from their flagship desktop GIS product, CrimeView, displayed using the Google Maps API.

Public crime mapping is nothing new in Lincoln. We launched one of the nation's first interactive mapping applications in the spring of 1999, and our current public mapping application, CrimeView Community, is the fourth generation of our public mapping.

CrimeMapping.com has some similarities to CrimeView Community, but also some significant differences. Perhaps its greatest advantages is that is uses the highly-intuitive and well-known Google Maps interface. It has some very nice graphic design, and has a sleek look and feel. And, of course, it's multi-jurisdictional.

CrimeView Community, on the other hand, offers more control over queries, some additional reporting capabilities, more details, and the backdrop of Lincoln's more accurate and extensive geographic layers--including the latest aerial photos (Google's are several years old.)

Personally, I like both. For the moment, we'll have both available. Options are a good thing. Try CrimeMapping.com out, let me know what you think, and if you have any feedback for the developers, I'll pass it on to our friends at the Omega Group.

Fast information flow

This is a short story about information technology contributing to police work. It's not a big case, and not particularly flashy, but when I thought about it, it seemed to be a remarkable example of how the flow of information in investigations has changed.

I had tickets to the Nebraska v. Oklahoma State football game Saturday. Before heading out to the game, I checked my email. Among the dozen or so was one from myself. I have an automated Threshold Alert that had triggered the email. The alert is one of over 40 automatic queries that run every morning in the wee hours, using data from our police Records Management System and our geographic crime analysis software, CrimeView. This particular query is one I wrote last summer, after the City Council adopted a residency restriction on certain high-risk sex offenders. The ordinance prohibits level 3 high-risk offenders whose victim was under the age of 19 from residing within 500 ft. of a school. At the time it was being debated, some people wondered how in the world it could be enforced. Like this:

The Threshold Alert looks into the 1.5 million names in the department's master name index, finds the registered sex offenders, and determines which are classified as level 3 high-risk offenders. Next, CrimeView creates 500 ft buffers around each of Lincoln's schools, and determines which of these offenders' addresses fall within these buffers. Finally, it checks the date of the address. Since you can't enforce an ex post facto law, the residency restriction only applies after July 1, 2006. Whenever we update a person's address in our master name index, we also store the date of the address update. My query is interested in new addresses.

The email I received gave me the results of my query: there was a high risk offender with a new address, just updated on Friday, who now appeared to be living within 500 ft. of a school, in violation of the ordinance. I opened CrimeView on my laptop and measured the distance from property line to property line at 260 feet against the backdrop of Lincoln's orthorectified aerial photos. I checked the Nebraska State Patrol's online sex offender registry (they're the official keeper of the record) and determined that this offender's victim was 14 years old. That was the final element of the offense. Just to save him time, I printed that page as a .pdf, and emailed it to Capt. Dennis Duckworth, Saturday morning's duty commander at HQ. He assigned Officer Steve Niemeyer to investigate. Good choice. Steve is our Officer of the Year.

Steve found the offender at home, and cited him for the violation. He had just moved into the apartment, and alleged that his landlord had told him that he was 900 ft. from the school. Steve had already used Google Earth to make his own estimate of 265 ft., but as one final check, he used a Rolatape to measure a precise distance of 253 ft., lot to lot. At 1307 hours, I received an email from Officer Niemeyer letting me know that he had handled the matter, and providing me the case number, so I could read the reports online after the game. Nice work, Steve.

That's a heck of a lot of technology squeezed into a misdemeanor.

New view

Yesterday, Jim Anderson over at the City's Information Services Division, made a little change to our public crime mapping application, CrimeView Community. We have a new set of 2007 aerial photos, and Jim replaced the 2005 series with the new ones. Aerial photos show up when you zoom in a click or two.

Contrary to a common belief, these are not satellite photos. Rather, they are photos shot from aircraft overflight, then orthorectified. This is a nice set, with six inch resolution: a single pixel is approximately six inches on the ground. They've also been updated in the City's other web mapping applications, such as the Lancaster County Property Map--which is probably a better place to browse the photo layer, since CrimeView Community limits how close you can zoom. Google Maps and Google Earth (a great application for touring) are actually two versions behind in the aerials--the photos date from 2003, as I recall. Microsoft Virtual Earth uses the 2005 photos.

Aerial photos are a very nice tool for police officers in a variety of situations: special events planning, tactical operations, missing person searches, crime scene and traffic crash investigation, and so forth. With the growth, change, and development that occurs in the City, a new set every couple of years is a very good thing to have. I'll be looking forward to getting the 2007 series in the compressed MrSID format, so we can incorporate those into our mobile mapping application for the field.


In CrimeView Community, the aerial photos show up automatically as you zoom in. In the Lancaster County Property map, you'll need to turn that layer on when it becomes available in the table of contents at the lower right. I'd suggest turning the parcel layer off, too, just to reduce clutter. Aside from the usual interesting places to look at on your tour, such as the State Capital and Memorial Stadium, I like the Pioneer Park bison (both live and bronze), and there are a couple of really cool lawn darts parked with the KC-135s .

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:

GIS geek this week

Guilty. I confess that I am a minor-league geek when it comes to geography, particularly geographic information systems—the computerized merger of databases and maps. Minor league, because I have no professional background or formal education in either of these disciplines. I got interested in GIS in the early 1990’s when I perceived that it could be a beneficial way of analyzing and understanding crime and disorder.

Appearances to the contrary, I am not at all infatuated with crime mapping. I think GIS can be a good tool, but the database is much more valuable than the pretty picture. If I had to pick, I’d take a table I can query over a map any day. Nonetheless, we human beings are pretty visual, and GIS can provide a view of data that makes relationships pop out that would otherwise be concealed in green-striped paper. As crime mapping has matured, I think police analysts have become far more interested in the analytical capabilities of GIS, rather than the map itself.

The weapon of choice at LPD is ArcGIS. Four employees use the high-end version, supported by a great crime analysis extension, CrimeView. For everyone else in the department, we deploy a splendid CrimeView intranet application that provides a great deal of capability in an easy-to-use interface. Finally, for the general public, we maintain CrimeView Community and participate in crimemapping.com.

What to we use GIS for? Essentially, it supports four functions. First, it provides us with excellent electronic maps on our PCs—even in our patrol cars. When you’re planning a special event, preparing for the execution of a search warrant, and involved in certain kinds of field operations it can be very valuable simply to have a map with basic geographic layers. With great aerial photos, these maps can really help us get oriented.

Second, GIS supports tactical analysis. We use GIS to help identify crime and disorder problems and target our resources towards these more effectively. Third, GIS supports strategic analysis. by helping to identify and understand broader problems that require more comprehensive and longer term approaches. Finally, we use GIS for investigative purposes, including crime scene investigation, surveillance, figuring out the identity of potential suspects, connecting crimes with common M.O.s, and more.

The links in this post will give you some good examples of these uses we make of geographic information systems. I’ll blog a little more about GIS as the week unfolds.

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:

Wildcard queries

Late last week, the Omega Group, makers of the CrimeView suite of products we use, announced a small addition to their web-based mapping product, CrimeView Dashboard: Wildcard Query.  This new feature allows users to add an ad hoc search with a wildcard within any field in the data, even one composed of unstructured text.  Let's say, for instance, that for some inexplicable reason you wanted to map the location of crimes committed with pumpkins.  Our crime data has fields for the mechanism of vandalism, and for weapons and projectiles, but "pumpkin" is not one of the values in the entry table.  The data does, however, include a 60 character comments field that summarizes the crime, and searching within that field for the term "pumpkin" would produce the map in a jiffy.

This isn't entirely new to LPD, as our records management system has always had this capability, but still, it's pretty nice if you want to do something like quickly map the location of the car/bicycle traffic crashes this year (78), or make a map of the home addresses of the registered sex offenders named "Bill" (4).

Exploring the function of the new feature, I ran a query for iCrimes this year, a topic I blogged about years ago, and one that still surfaces in the news from time to time.

Apple products of the iP* variety have figured in 471 crimes in Lincoln thus far in 2012.  The larcenies and burglaries are pretty obvious, and you can figure out scenarios pretty easily for the frauds, robberies, and auto thefts.  How, though, would an iPhone figure into a child abuse case?

Crimemapping.com update

A few weeks ago, I announced the availability of a new public crime mapping application, crimemapping.com. It is an alternative to CrimeView Community, and both are linked near the center of our public home page. While they both use the same data, the interface is somewhat different. Crimemapping.com employs the Google Maps API, whereas CrimeView Community uses our own more precise and complete geographic layers from the City-County GIS enterprise. They are both nice applications, and I thought we'd make both flavors available for now.

Recently, the Omega Group, which produces both of these applications, tweaked crimemapping.com a little bit, primarily by including the short summary "comments" field that so many readers of The Chief's Corner seem to appreciate.

I expect we'll continue to see some evolutionary changes, and I also notice that several additional agencies' data have been added.

Every now and then some controversy flairs up on the crimemap listserv about making information like this available to the public. Some cities are reluctant to do so, fearful that citizens will be unnecessarily alarmed, real estate prices will be negatively impacted, and so forth. I don't buy that. I do not think we should shield the public from the truth, even if the level of activity in their community might be a little surprising to some folks. I think citizens are thoughtful enough to make reasonable interpretations of "what it all means," and we are always willing to help anyone understand the context.

At the Lincoln police department, we have made interactive crime mapping applications available since 1998. These data are public record, and the mapping applications simply make the information somewhat more accessible. I think it is always a good thing when citizens are more informed about what's going on in their own city.

One of the cool features in crimemapping.com is the ability to sign up for notification. You can basically subscribe to an address of your choice in any of the participating communities, and a push email will be sent to you when a new offense has occurred within a user-specified radius of that address. Now that could really keep you informed about what's happening in the neighborhood. I'd be careful about the distance though, by keeping it small--there is a whole lot of stuff that goes on in Lincoln, and I wouldn't want to overwhelm your inbox!

Threshold alerts

Threshold alerts are automated emails that inform Lincoln police officers and commanders of crime trends or patterns that might otherwise be lost in the sheer volume of work we do. Threshold alerts merge our geographic crime analysis capabilities with the rich data resources provided by our own police database--the Lincoln Police Department's Records Management System.

With an average of about 400 events dispatched every day, it would be easy for an emerging trend or pattern to be missed. Enter Threshold Alerts. The queries are set up in advance, but after the initial set up, they are executed automatically with Windows Task Scheduler. The sky is the limit: if you can think of the question revolving around what, where, when, and how many, we can build a Threshold Alert. Every day, a group of more than 40 of these automated queries run during the early morning hours.

Threshold Alerts are a feature of one of our geographic crime analysis products, CrimeView from the Omega Group. We’ve had a long and productive working relationship with this firm since we first started using CrimeView in October, 2000. The most recent versions have included that ability to set up these automated queries that search for a certain number of incidents in a certain time period, occurring in a certain geographic area. The parameters of what, when, how many and where are defined by the user for each individual query.

As an example, Capt. Genelle Moore wants to know whenever there have been more than three commercial burglaries in the Northwest Team Area within the previous seven days. At 5:00 AM, the department’s geographic information system automatically runs a spatial query, and if that threshold number is met, Capt. Moore receives an automated email.
Attached to the email is a map of the offenses, and a tabular report (.pdf format, with hyperlinks) with the basic details. The case number is a link, and a click will take her to the complete case file—a splendid feature of our web-enabled and home-grown Records Management System.

Another Threshold Alert lets personnel know immediately if any high-risk sex offender appears in the department’s database with an address that is within 500 feet of a school. This automated notice alerts investigators to the potential violation of Lincoln’s residency restriction. Sgt. Michon Morrow receives a weekly threshold alert of repeat complaints at the same addresses about party disturbances in the Northwest Team Area; Officer Jeff Sorenson gets an alert whenever a new arrest warrant is issued for a resident of his beat; Capt. Brian Jackson is alerted to any narcotics cases during the preceding 24 hours, and so forth.

Getting information to officers quickly and making sense of the chaos of police work is a daunting task, but one at which the Lincoln Police Department excels. The quality of our primary police database and the partnership we have forged with the Omega Group, the supplier of our crime mapping software, has allowed us to do implement an interesting push technology that enhances the efficiency of our information systems.

Better use of time and skills

I had an interesting email Tuesday from the supervisor of a crime analysis unit that has recently acquired the same web-based software we use for much of our work: CrimeView Dashboard. Essentially, this product allows a designer to set up a bunch of pre-configured views of data for users, and still provides users with the ability to create and execute their own ad-hoc queries. These views can be maps, tables, graphs, and grids. There are other dashboard products from other vendors, this is just the one I am most familiar with.

The unit supervisor who emailed me is hearing rumblings that the brass thinks that they can reduce the number of crime analysts now, since they have this new-fangled application--even before it has been implemented. She wanted to know what I thought about that.

I sent her a rather lengthy reply, but here is the gist of it: a product of this type ought to let your officers, detectives, supervisors and managers serve themselves with most simple needs. This in turn, should free your staff to do more real analysis, rather than servicing rather simple information requests: "What is the breakdown or Part 1 crimes in my district by type?", "What are the top 10 places for false alarms so far this year?", "Can you make me a map of registered sex offenders I can take to the neighborhood association meeting tonight?" and so forth.

Most crime analysts spend a lot of time on gathering information for others that really ought to be readily available, and not nearly enough on actual analysis. If you can free them from the never-ending parade of "can you get this for me?" requests, there is better use to be made of their time and skills.

With the implementation of CrimeView Dashbaord or any similar product, I would hope to see more in-depth analyses, more and better bulletins; more frequent proactive emails about crime patterns uncovered, more profiles about prolific offenders identified, and briefings from the Crime Analysis Unit on emerging problems; more and better follow-up evaluation of police strategies, more cases connected by a common M.O. discovered, more predictions of the most likely times and locations of robbery in the next two weeks, more consultation by analysts with police commanders seeking information about what strategies have proven successful based on research evidence; and more timely and accurate identification of trends and patterns--because analysts are spending more of their time doing these things, instead of creating bar charts for lieutenants, maps for captains, and weekly statistical reports for the chief.

More analysis, less collation of basic descriptive information from the records management system: that should be the payoff. When you need advice on your portfolio of mutual funds and stocks, you turn to a financial analyst who not only should be reasonably expert concerning investments, but should also give you trusted advice on a strategy to help you accomplish your goals. That's the same thing a crime analyst should do, and he or she should not be spending the majority of time gathering statistics and making PowerPoints for the technologically-challenged. 

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).

Alerts to schools and parks

One of the more interesting bits of technology we have availed ourselves of in recent years has been the Threshold Alert, a feature of CrimeView, our geographic crime analysis software from the Omega Group. I’ve described Threshold Alerts and how we use them in previous posts. This spring, while I was attending the Omega Group’s annual users’ conference, an idea suddenly struck me. The company’s software and services target three industries: fire departments (FireView), police departments (CrimeView) and school districts (School Planner.) All three domains were represented at the conference, and I was rubbing shoulders with some of the school district participants when it hit me.

Here was the thought: why not send a Threshold Alert to school district personnel? When I got back to Lincoln, I emailed the head of security at the Lincoln Public Schools, sent him a sample, and asked him if there might be any interest in receiving this on a regular basis. He was in my office a couple of days later, and since that time I have been sending a daily report to him and to Student Services with the details on each Lincoln Police Incident Report concerning incidents that occurred at public schools on the previous day.

I had a similar thought a couple weeks later. Mayor Beutler had asked me about the police calls at a specific City park. I provided the information about police incidents at that park, and I also looked at a few similar parks for comparison purposes. It struck me that the Parks & Recreation Department Director might be interested in a weekly Threshold Alert, just so he didn’t miss any of these. I created two for him: all police dispatches to parks, and police Incident Reports of incidents occurring at parks. I am running these on a weekly, rather than daily basis, so he gets the snapshot on Mondays.

I think both Lincoln Public Schools and the Parks & Recreation Department were probably already aware of most of the events documented in these reports. Nonetheless, it’s a nice double-check, and with the automated process it really doesn’t require any significant effort to deliver this nice daily or weekly summary to their inbox. It would, of course, be a pretty simple matter for an individual principal, park superintendant, business owner, landlord, or resident to create their own version of this using Crime Alerts—another tool from the Omega Group that is part of the crimemapping.com website—just by selecting the address of interest and the smallest possible buffer, 500 feet. In Lincoln, that would give you the significant crimes within a radius of about a block and a half.

Mobile oblique imagery

By now, I suspect readers understand that oblique aerial imagery has some real value for public safety personnel.  When the chips are down, however, you may need that data quickly, with a minimal amount of futzing, and without access to the computer back on your desktop. I am convinced that in public safety technology, the future lies in applications optimized for mobile data computers, tablets, and smartphones.

Oblique imagery dips a toe in this water now, and the mobile tools will continue to evolve. Here are a few examples. The first image is the historic Kennard House in Lincoln, depicted in this screenshot from my iPad mini running Pictometry Connect Mobile. The second image is the same scene, on my iPhone using CrimeView NEARme.

The next big deal in mobile imagery is location-based services: delivering the images to you based on your mobile device's known location. In the world of tech today applications must be mobile, and this is particularly true in public safety where the workforce is mobile and the incidents dynamic. Pictometry Connect Mobile and CrimeView NEARme are already location aware: a tap centers the map on your current location. Not far off will be the next evolution of this concept, putting the images in motion with the user, perhaps even orienting the viewpoint based on the device's direction of travel, providing more of a sensation of moving through the image without any need by the user to reorient the viewpoint.

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.

Source of success

I've been contacted in the past week by The Spokane Police Department, the Lexington Police Department, the St.Louis Metropolitan Police Department and the New Jersey State Police. These agencies are seeking information about our police information systems. Three of the four were particularly interested in our use of CrimeView Dashboard, a GIS-centric analysis and visualization product from the Omega Group.

While the software these agencies inquired about is great, it is the quality and quantity of data behind it that allows us to be so successful with CrimeView and our other information resources. That is a product of thirty years of development by our own IT staff, especially Mr. Clair Lindquist, who has put Lincoln in the position so envied by other cities.

Cut the cord

Longtime readers of my blog know that on occasion I will utterly geek out. This is one of those occasions, so proceed at your own risk. There are, however, many readers of the Director's Desk that share the nerd gene, so cut us some slack.

Every year, I teach a two-day course called Information Resources to new recruits in the police academy. I always enjoy it, and have blogged about it before. It was on the agenda for last Thursday and Friday, in week two of the current class. On Friday afternoon, I moved the 13 trainees from Classroom A to the main conference room. My motive was twofold: first, a change of scenery after a week in the classroom would be nice; second, I wanted to use the big 60 inch monitor in the conference room instead of the LCD projector in the classroom, in order to try out a new toy.

Right before Christmas, I bought an Apple TV. One of the factors in my decision was the ability to mirror content wirelessly from Macs, iPads, and iPhones--a feature Apple calls AirPlay. On Christmas eve, we streamed 3,000 or so family photos from Tonja's iPad to the LED television in the family room while the holiday music played and we all enjoyed the grand kids rampage through the wrapping paper. I started thinking, though, about other uses for the Apple TV at work, and on Friday I implemented the trial run.

I wanted to run a presentation, and then demonstrate and train on some applications that require a computer (CrimeView Dashboard), an iPad and an iPhone (CrimeView NEARme). So during the lunch break I hooked up my Apple TV to the big monitor in the conference room. During the afternoon session, I moved back and forth mirroring the content from a MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone--wirelessly, seamlessly, and with nothing more than a swipe. Had I thought about it, I could have had the students with iPhone 4S or 5 (about half) do the same thing, and we could have passed control of the content on the big screen around to our hearts' content.

I've put a kit together with a spare power cord and HDMI cord, so I can steal the Apple TV from the family room without having to snake cords from behind the entertainment center. It seems to me that this would be a terrific setup for a college instructor or someone like me that does a lot of business presentations or training sessions.  Your iPad becomes a full-featured wireless presentation pad, allowing you to roam at will, hand it off to anyone else, and even trade off control of the content with other devices in the room. Actually, it's far more than a presentation device, because you can do much more than navigate among slides: you can switch applications, surf the web, and interact just as if you were standing at a computer hard-wired to a projector. Apple's presentation software, Keynote, works very well with this set up. I can open a PowerPoint stored in Dropbox, Keynote converts the format automatically, and I can run it from my iPhone or iPad mini while wandering. It looks just as good as if I had done it from a laptop on the podium tethered to the projector.

The caveat is that all the devices and the Apple TV must be on the same WiFi network, and it's HDMI out, so you need a monitor or projector with HDMI in. In a room with an HDMI projector and WiFi, this just beats the pants off a laptop and a long VGA cord. One other thing I've noticed about my Apple devices is how easily they all seem to work with various LCD projectors when using standard VGA. For years I've wrestled trying to get projectors to recognize laptops. The drill is to show up to your room 20 minutes early, futz around with resolution settings, graphics properties, and Ctrl-F8 until your hands are sweaty and the audience is fidgeting waiting for an image. Not with Apple. Plug it in, and it just works.

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.

FireView Dashboard

This week, we have begun to roll out a new application at Lincoln Fire & Rescue, FireView Dashboard from the Omega Group. We have been using their police application, CrimeView Dashboard, at the Lincoln Police Department for several years. These products are examples of many in the marketplace for both government and the private sector that provide tools for analyzing, visualizing, and reporting data from large back-office databases. The object of such products is to provide views of data that are more intuitive and meaningful than green-striped paper spitting from a line printer.

Here are a few examples of things that I've learned or had reinforced by FireView Dashboard as I've worked on setting up data views in the past few weeks. These individual view frames are called widgets, and we have authored 391 of those for the application. That is only the pre-configured portion, though, as the Analysis Mode allows users to create a virtually unlimited number of queries on the fly. The images are just screen shots; in the app you can zoom, pan, change the view (for instance from a map to a day-of-week chart), and drill down as far as you wish--even to the individual incident data. I don't think any of these are a big surprise to firefighters in Lincoln, and some were things that I already knew or suspected, but they are now immediately clear. Click on any of these images for a slightly larger and more legible view.

Medical emergencies dominate
EMS is nearly 80% of our business, and the remainder is composed primarily of false alarms and standby duty at athletic events. Fires are few. I think of them as low frequency, but high-criticality events, for which you must be properly equipped and trained, despite their rarity. Since our core business is emergency medical services, our recruitment, hiring, training, and organizational culture need to reflect the reality of what we actually do. This ought also inform our decisions about what to drive.

The rhythm of the day
The demand for LF&R services peaks at about the same time as the demand for police services: around the time of the evening rush hour. We should keep this in mind when planning discretionary activity like a workout or fueling up the rig during this time, in order to maximize our availability and minimize turnout time.

Problematic false alarms
I've blogged on many occasions about efforts by the police to reduce chronic false burglar alarms, and the value thereof. A burglar alarm, however, is small potatoes compared to a false fire alarm, which sends a convoy of resources by comparison: six to eight firefighters in at least two large apparatus that suck diesel fuel at around 3.5 MPG. If we do something in collaboration with the owners or managers to reduce repeat false alarms, it  be a will be a very good thing. It's not just the resources, either. I walk by the photos of three firefighters and three police officers nearly every day, who were killed in the line of duty during emergency driving. Reducing unnecessary Code 3 driving protects everyone.

Residential fire hotspot
House fires have a strong geographic pattern in Lincoln, one that I have seen before. The same pattern is evident in crime. Despite the conventional wisdom, I do not believe this pattern of house fires is the result of newer construction at the edge. Rather, I think it is a reflection of population density and a host of socio-economic factors. The historic core of Lincoln, represented by an ellipse that runs roughly from Cooper Park in the southwest to the edge of Nebraska Wesleyan University in the northeast, is where we need the most fire suppression capability, and a great place to focus fire prevention work.

These are only a few examples of how we can use data and analysis to help guide our operations. FireView Dashboard is a powerful application with immense capabilities, and this is not even scratching the surface. Anyone who has read my blog for a while knows that I am an advocate for, and practitioner of, data-driven management. In this day and age it is critical for public-sector organizations to make decisions based on analysis, and to optimize their service-delivery wherever possible.

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.

Learn and share

Just got home Saturday from a trip to the Omega Group User's Conference in San Diego, where I had been invited to deliver the keynote address. The Omega Group is the maker of CrimeView, our analytical mapping software, and the provider of crimemapping.com. By San Diego standards, it was cool--I actually needed a sweater. The blast of winter-in-April that awaited us upon return, however, was...bracing.

The theme of my keynote was threefold: use the results of your analysis to support more and better prevention projects; move beyond static maps, bulletins and other products to interactive content; prepare yourself for a future where your ability to manage data and information is a key to effective policing.

On that subject, it is remarkable to me to think back on how things have changed in the past decade or so. From a hotel room in California, I could attend our daily shift briefings, keep up on police reports and case files, and attend to the blog--not to mention the huge volume of daily email.

I had the chance to meet in person a couple of people I've assisted via telephone and web conference. Cesar Abreu, the supervisor of the Crime Analysis and Intelligence Unit at the Yakima, WA police department was in attendance. He is in the process of ramping up a GIS operation within his unit, and got some nice press on the efforts recently.

I also met up with Sgt. Rick Fisher, of the Gulfport, MS police. Gulfport, you will recall, was demolished by hurricane Katrina. Police headquarters was among the casualties. When I first talked to Rick, the department was operating out of trailers. They've now moved to a former school, while there headquarters is being constructed. Rick has had the opportunity to start up a crime mapping and analysis operation as well.

It was a pleasure to give some advice and information to Cesar and Rick, and I enjoyed meeting them in person. I picked up several good tips during the conference, and I hope I've shared some of my own with others.