The Lincoln Police Department Annual Report for 2008 is now available online at our public web site. In fact, it’s only available online. Anyone who wants to hold it in their hand will have to print it on their own. The graphics designer, editor, and publisher is Officer Katie Flood, who wears several hats in our Management Services Unit. She is also part of our accreditation team, the manager of our public web page, and the department’s Public Information Officer.
When Ofc. Flood showed me some of the preliminary draft pages, I assumed that she must have some kind of professional background in desktop publishing. Not the case, she just has a natural talent. The clever text border around the title page, the selection of fonts and photos, and the use of white space are all nice touches. Freed from print, she was also able to make some more creative use of color. Check out the table of calls for service by day and time on page 37: a temporal heat chart, very nice!
Except for a gap from the mid 1970’s to the mid 1980’s, we now have LPD annual reports stretching back to 1941. Many of the same data is included in each, and it is an impressive historical archive. We also have the City’s annual audit reports back to 1904. While these are primarily financial reports in later years, they contain a little bit of police information. The pages concerning the police department contain such things as a of expenditures ($12.25 for “Rogues pictures” in 1905 p. 7) and data on the number of charges of arrests. In 1915, we arrested 13 people for the offense of “Dope fiend,” and 13 for the offense of “Insulting women.” There is no indication as to whether these were the same rogues, however.
They’re all available online, thanks to the labor of a number of unpaid interns who’ve contributed to this effort. If you’re interested in such things, I posted a list of some of the most memorable or interesting pages in the LPD archive of Annual Reports last year.
By the way,dropping the print version this year will save us $3,910.
14 comments:
Paged through the report. Looks great. The heatmap is effective not just in illustrating the busiest hours, but also that you're not idle the rest of the time. The average cell in that heatmap is 762 calls, so the busiest hours are only a 2x multiple of the mean and 2.43 std dev's away from the mean.
Another slick (and free) tool for looking at this sort of data is a treemap. Microsoft has a free Excel add-in for that (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/3f3ed95e-26d8-4616-a06c-b609df29756f/default.aspx). Would be a good way to visualize the type of call rather than your standard bar chart or data table.
mid 19080s? :) hehe
Improper turn 457-375 -17.9%
Why are the improper turns not being enforced. I was out for ten minutes and I saw 6 improper turns.
Most recent:These two.
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-243633
Of course the first one has a women on the cell phone so that would be a warning. But the school bus full of kids.
How many of the 4,597 no proof of insurance citations later produced the certificate?
Number of persons attending presentations.
Can we sign up via email for the presentations LPD gives. There were 659 last year and I did not hear of one of them. This could be a good way for someone to do volunteer work. Beats sitting at the hospital desk and greeting people.
Jim J
IMPROPER TURNS
Cut us some slack. There are going to be some year-to-year fluctuations in individual categories of citations. There were a total of 101,475 warnings and officials, and a double-digit increase over 2007.
NO PROOF OF INSURANCE
No way of knowing. The great majority, I suspect.
PRESENTATIONS
Those would be by the Community Service staff only. I must have done 100 more personally! The Community Services personnel schedule requests from groups such as schools, PTOs, individual neighborhood watch groups, media organizations, service clubs, and so forth. Who these are opened to and how they are promoted or advertised is up to the host. This staff has been reduced in recent years due to budget cuts, so that number is declining--we simply can't come close to fulfilling the requests in a timely manner.
Jim J
Another aspect of the improper turns; Most of the improper turn violations are enforced are after 2200 hours. The citations that are usually issued for that violation are for negligent driving. Most DUI stops are more that one violation ex. speeding, fail to signal, unable to maintain lane, playing pin ball with curbs... You name it. Improper turns are being enforced, but when you have two violations, negligent driving citations are issued.
Speaking of rogues' pictures, are dispatchers able to send on-file mug shots to cruisers' MDT screens, or is that too bandwidth-intensive?
http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-244235
Superior St is screaming for traffic enforcement
6:41-
Dispatchers can't do that, but officers can pull up a mugshot--thumbnail, about the size of your driver's license photo, to their MDC if they have the time. It's between 30 seconds and a minute and a half, depending--but still pretty handy in some circumstances, such as no ID and can't spell own middle name.
We're working on that bandwidth issue, though, with a plan to deploy our 4.9mhz licensed public safety RF license in a series of lilypads.
'We're working on that bandwidth issue, though, with a plan to deploy our 4.9mhz licensed public safety RF license in a series of lilypads.'
Can you explain what this means?
8:10-
No, I haven't got any idea. Sounded good, though.
Okay, actually it's like a wireless hot spot on steroids--no contention with the general public trying to download youtubes, bigger radius of the coverage area.
That bandwidth will probably come in handy for downloading database updates to your future ALPRS cruiser(s), as well as uploading field-scanned fingerprints for identity confirmation. Most contacted people that "don't have any ID on them at the moment" have likely been fingerprinted by law enforcement numerous times before. It'd be harder to get away with using your brother's name when you don't have your brother's fingers.
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