Priority one

Last summer, readers of my then-new blog followed the trials and tribulations of the budget season. I've been through many of these, and it's never a walk in the park. Last year, though, was something quite different: the City's revenue was obviously not keeping up with expenses, and serious cuts were pending. At the eleventh hour, the police department escaped the long knives. This wasn't the case with other departments, though, and some serious pain was experienced.

I realized last year that the 2008-2009 budget would be more of the same, and perhaps worse--since the City took advantage of some one-time only money to balance the current budget. Think about it: if you house payment with your tax rebate this year, what will you do next year, when there is no rebate? So, the budget season is now upon us, and my presentation of our proposed police department budget to the Mayor is scheduled for tomorrow.

Mayor Beutler has a firm grasp on the City's predicament, and for this reason he has been engaged in a strategy to force citizens (and City Council members) to face the music. The City's revenue simply isn't keeping up with the cost of delivering our services. In the coming 2008-2009 fiscal year, the cost of delivering exactly the same services will exceed the City's projected revenue by $5.9 million. Something has to give. We've got to decide exactly what we want from City government, and exactly what we are willing to pay.

This past weekend was a step in that direction. Following up on the scientific survey of 600 Lincoln residents commissioned by the City and conducted by the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center, a meeting with about 51 of the 600 participants took place on Saturday. The participants were drawn from those who participated in the random survey. They received a sobering briefing on the City's financial situation. Following this, they participated in a day of "deliberative discussions." This is a process the Public Policy Center has employed to put some more meat on the bones of the survey process. The City is also hosting an on-line survey and town hall meetings, although these are not scientifically controlled.

At the end of the day, the participants ranked the City's seven outcomes in order of priority. Safety and Security was ranked first by each of the six break-out groups. Since the mission of the Lincoln Police Department is to provide quality police services that promote a safe and secure community, our purpose for existing is pretty much at the heart of what citizens ranked as their top priority in a time of declining resources. Our challenge is to be good stewards of the funds entrusted to us, to deliver our services efficiently, and to continue to earn the respect of citizens who support our mission as their top priority.

First anniversary

I just passed one year of blogging . I have made 203 posts, filling about 296 pages of text (not counting the comments) and there have been 125,489 visits to The Chief's Corner. I think I'll take the day off the blog.

Actually, Internet Explorer has frozen on my computer, and I'm devoting the morning to either getting it cleared up, or switching to Firefox. Wish me luck.

Not an urban legend

I can always tell when some technophobe has recently discovered the existence of email: they forward a message to me that starts something like this:

"Please accept graciously my sorrow for troubling you, and allow me introducing to say I am the receiver of estate of the Deputy Director of Oil Resources...."

The newbie wants me to know that suspicious dealing of some sort is going on that he or she feels the police chief should be aware of. (Sigh.) I have snopes.com bookmarked, and when I receive the latest scam or urban legend, I usually just fire the appropriate link back to the sender.

I started receiving several nearly-identical emails last night, forwarded from a variety of people. As of right now, nine different people have forwarded it to me asking if it is true. Here is the gist, which I have abridged somewhat due to its length:

"I just wanted to warn all of you about the recent assault that took place here in Lincoln....24 yr old female left her friends house and was involved in a car accident/assault. The car in front of her slammed on their brakes, causing her to hit that car and then the car behind hit her...The victim thought something was up and realized that she was blocked in...Somehow she got her car out and the other cars involved followed her recklessly. She called the friend...and said that someone was after her. She drove back to her friends house and the other cars followed her and pulled her out of the car. They started beating her on the driveway, when her friends came out of the house to help her...these women pulled guns on the friend ...they left with her purse. This victim was taken to the hospital and had emergency plastic surgery on her face...Her body is bruised and sore....the women were on line within an hour using her credit cards and bought a laptop and some items from foot locker...This isn't a hoax--this victim works for a friend of mine. Please be careful and send this on to others that you care about."

You will recognize some of the common signs of an urban legend: the unspecified location and date; the scary story of an attack by strangers; the statement, "This isn't a hoax"; and the victim identified as a friend of an acquaintance. Here's the problem: it's not an urban legend. The circulating email is actually a fairly accurate account of a Sunday morning robbery-assault that has been widely reported. It's a horrible crime--one of thousands of horrible crimes that occur in our City every year. This one was particularly heinous and will probably rank in the top 100 most despicable violent crimes of the year in my informal one-person poll.

What I found remarkable is that so many people who have received and forwarded the email are seemingly oblivious to two things: first, the news; second, the fact that even in Lincoln lots of horrid crime is committed by evil people.

Here is the response I am sending to everyone who forwards this story to me:

"Basically true--with perhaps a slight embellishment in that we do not know whether these women intentionally struck the victim's car as part of a planned robbery scheme, or whether they were involved in a "road rage" incident and just went berserk. Believe it or not, the suspects are not exactly being helpful in the investigation. We also cannot say that these women are members of an organized gang. None of them have prior gang intelligence information, and several are relatives. You can compare the email account you received with the various news stories:

http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2008/04/07/news/local/doc47fa482f4f1a5149789343.txt http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2008/04/06/news/local/doc47f9582fc1f42788909932.txt http://www.kolnkgin.com/home/headlines/17339999.html
http://www.klkntv.com/Global/story.asp?S=8131421&nav=menu96_2
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2008/04/10/news/local/doc47fe02ab05e13014780492.txt

Tom Casady
Chief of Police"

Establishing a baseline

We are in the opening stages of the Stronger Safer Neighborhoods Initiative--Mayor Chris Beutler's focus on protecting fragile neighborhoods from reaching a crime tipping point. The Administrative Assistant to the Mayor hired to coordinate the City's activities in this effort, Jon Carlson, is working here at the police department, as a member of the Southwest Team. The area we will be focusing on is 42 square blocks in Lincoln's core, between A and G Streets, 9th and 17th Streets.

One of the first things we need to get in order is the establishment of some baseline data that we can use as the benchmark for progress. Tracking our progress is critical for determining whether these efforts are having an impact, and alerting us if adjustments are needed. Police data can be an important source of such information, and readers of The Chief's Corner will realize that we have some excellent capabilities to collect, analyze, and disseminate information about police incidents.

Figuring out what to measure, however, requires some thought. An obvious approach might be to measure police dispatches. If, however, the initiative results in more police presence and greater outreach to citizens in the area of focus, the net effect could be to increase, rather than decrease, police incidents.

In order to avoid a reporting phenomenon that is misleading, we intend to collect baseline data of three separate types: overall police incident reports, dispatches to disturbances, and a subset of crime reports composed of the following offenses: burglaries, narcotics cases, larcenies from auto, and assaults. These four "indicator crimes" occur in large enough numbers that changes can be detected over time, and they are crimes for which levels of reporting have not been influenced by recent changes in reporting practices. We will be looking at these indicators on a quarterly basis, comparing the trend to the previous quarter, and to the same period in the prior year. Here's the baseline for this subset of incidents:

Police incidents can provide some of the data to track neighborhood conditions, but we will also need to locate and track other kinds of data, particularly those related to housing, the physical environment, and residents' perceptions of safety and well being. In coming weeks, we will be working to cultivate sources of information for this purpose. We will be turning to other partners, such as NeighborWorks, Free to Grow, and the Everett and Near South Neighborhood Associations to help collect these data.

Sharing an idea

This post is for those interested in crime analysis, GIS, and Internet technology.

I participate in one and only one listserv, the CRIMEMAP group, at the Department of Justice, Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety program. I don't have much time to read lists, but I continue to subscribe to this one because the traffic is fairly light and I can occasionally contribute something worthwhile.

A total stranger posted this question to the list last week:

> I have a hyper linking question...
>
> I have a theme of Department of Corrections releases that I have
> hyperlinked their subject lookups from the DOC website into the URL.
> It works on my map, but when I export the data out to share w/ the
> others in my agency the hyperlinks are no longer there. Does anyone
> know how they can be saved in a theme that can be shared w/ others?
>
> Certified Law Enforcement Analyst
> Hernando County Sheriff's Office

The analyst who posted this question was trying to build web links to the public site of the Florida Department of Corrections (DOC) into her mapping application. She wanted to distribute this to others with links in this electronic map, so her colleagues could click and get more detailed information about recently-released inmates. We've been building links like these into our map applications for years, and I recognized her problem as a field length issue. I gave her some ideas for troubleshooting and asked her to send me the geographic layer itself. After I received it, I emailed something back to her in about 10 minutes that I thought might be even easier than her approach. Her response:

>OH WOW - That is AWESOME.....!!!

Here is the file that caused her to type in caps. It's a .kml file--keyhole markup language--the format Google Earth uses. If you have Google Earth installed, it will launch when you click this link. If you don't have Google Earth installed, you can click here to open it in Google Maps, instead. This is all public record information from the Florida Department of Corrections public web site.

Her next email jokingly (I think) offered me a trip to Florida. It was just what she wanted--the ability to easily distribute these data to colleagues without any GIS background, and I could quickly explain the process to her. It's phenomenal what can be easily accomplished with free applications and tools today, compared to just two or three years ago.

The power of parents

Email sent to our generic Lincoln Police address from our public web site is reviewed by Clair Lindquist, our Information Technology Unit manager. He responds to those that he can, and forwards others to an appropriate recipient. He forwarded this one to me recently:

"I would like to file a complaint for littering. On March 12, 2008, a blue Chevy Cavalier, NE license #_____ was traveling east at app. 61st and A Street. The time was app. 5 pm. There were two occupants in the car. The passenger who had curly hair age around 17 tossed a soda can in front of my vehicle. I was driving in the curb lane and the other car was in the inside lane."

I removed the license number from this post, to protect the innocent. I ran the plate, looked up the registered owner, and gave her a telephone call at about 8:00 AM. As I had expected, I was speaking to the mother of a high school student. After introductions, I simply read her the email, and asked her if she could help me by making sure the driver of the car was aware that other people are watching.

We had a nice conversation, and she was very happy to take care of the matter. I imagine that later that afternoon a couple of teenagers were probably surprised to find out that the chief of police had called. I learned a long time ago that the power of mothers and fathers is considerably greater than that of the police.

...and darned if you don't

The Lincoln Journal Star allows readers to post comments on certain articles. I do not delude myself into believing that posted comments are representative of the citizens of Lincoln overall. Nonetheless, I like to read them at times, because there are occasional nuggets of wisdom that inform, or humor that entertains.

I have noticed that there is a sub-set of LJS commentators who regularly bust my chops about the fact that among many, many other things, the police department engages in efforts to reduce the impact of high-risk drinking parties on neighborhoods and on the community. Here's some typical examples of the critique:

Kurt wrote on January 27, 2008 3:22 pm: "...maybe it would have never gotten this bad if the police weren't so worried about our small keg parties and instead busted the crack heads... "

Shelly wrote on January 28, 2008 6:13 pm: " ...there's always five to seven cop cars downtown...what about cops that bust college parties?"

mike wrote on March 22, 2008 2:42 am: " ...I do not know what we pay our police chief for. He attacks bars, bar owners, people of legal age who party...get a life and go stop some real crime."

It was strangely gratifying to open Wednesday's Lincoln Journal Star and see an article about the North Bottoms neighborhood containing just the opposite criticism:

"...Caudill lives in Omaha, but spent 21 years in the North Bottoms and keeps a place at the Hayward Place Condos, a complex he manages. He left more than a year ago, driven out in part by his frustrations over late-night parties and what he believes was inadequate police enforcement...."

I'm used to catching it from both directions at the same time.

I empathize with Mr. Caudill. When you have a job, kids, and responsibilities, it's not much fun living next door to some hard-partying 20-somethings who regale you with their exploits in the wee hours. There is a legitimate police role in trying to control illegal behavior that makes it difficult for other residents to enjoy their own home. You should expect the police to do so, but you should realize that it is only one of many competing demands upon their resources.

I think the key is to try to maintain balance: don't become so focused on one or a few issues that other important issues are neglected, and don't ignore the small stuff lest it becomes big stuff. You can read all about our efforts to reduce the impact of large drinking parties, the rationale behind those efforts, and the results.

Jean Ortiz, the author the North Bottoms article, wanted me to comment about Ed Caudill's criticism. I told her that we have focused a lot of effort on the North Bottoms, but that ultimately the police were not responsible for the economic and social trends that have caused this neighborhood to go from an area of families and owner-occupied houses to an area primarily of rental houses attractive to single young people. We didn't close Hayward Elementary School, cause Reifschneider's Grocery to be replaced by a mini mart, build Interstate 180 or move the University of Nebraska to the doorstep.

I also told her that my perception was that the conditions in the neighborhood have noticeably improved in the past decade or so. I was thinking about things like the replacement of the rickety 10th Street overpass, the demolition of a group of seriously-dilapidated houses, and the new streetscape features recently installed. But I was also thinking about the police incidents occurring in the neighborhood. I told her that if I could have a couple of hours, I would bring some data to bear on that, and see if my perception holds any water. She was near her 4:00 P.M. deadline, and declined. My own curiosity had been piqued, though, so I produced this spreadsheet:


Column B is wild party complaints, column C is total police dispatches, and column D is dispatches to disturbances of all types. I made another chart looking at bell-weather crimes: burglary, larceny from auto, drug offenses, and assaults. It showed the same pattern. Looks like my perception was pretty accurate.

Beer burglars return

Ah, spring: the daffodils, the pansies, and the burglars. As the weather warms, the thieves awake from their winter hibernation. Thirstier than ever, they prowl the 'burbs looking for the lucrative target: an open garage equpped with a fridge.

We had two "beer burglaries" over the weekend. I'm not sure if the bottle of Woodbridge chardonnay counts. Needless to say, that one was at the far southern edge of the city. The Rockets do not drink chardonnay.

Beer burglaries, of course, are vastly under-reported. Victims either don't bother to call the police, or in some cases don't realize exactly why the inventory has been shrinking. These cases normally occur in the evening, prior to ma and pa's bedtime. Too many people leave the garage door open until the lights are shut off for the night:

Although it is likely reported at a low rate in relation to the actual incidence, the crime shows a distinctivepattern that is rather obvious to Lincoln residents:


The clusters on this map simply depict the parts of Lincoln where you are likely to find garages with spare refrigerators therein. The tilt towards the southeast is apparent with a healthy dose of the Highlands in the northwest, and Regent Heights in the northeast.

Beer isn't the only target of garage shopping, though. Golf clubs, for example, were taken in 22 residential burglaries last year. Think about it: a thousand dollars worth of thunder sticks in a tidy package with a convenient carrying handle. Tools and bicycles are also particularly vulnerable to this type of open garage door theft.

Last May, I reported on an elegantly simple project the Southeast Team was engaged in to reduce these burglaries. They finished the year with 83 open garage burglaries, 43 fewer than their average in the preceeding three years--a reduction of 34%. Not bad at all.