Crime mapping is increasingly becoming an important tool for law enforcement agencies. Police executives need up-to-date information to redefine their organizational goals and objectives, to define priorities, to design and implement solutions, and to assess the strategic impact of their departments’ efforts to control crime. Street level problem solvers need routine access to information to scan for problems, analyze them, and implement and assess community or problem based policing efforts. Community groups seek information about crime and the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Increasingly, police agencies are relying upon computer crime mapping to identify and distribute information required by the community, police executives, and patrol officers to achieve a successful community policing partnership. Indeed, information technology is a critical ingredient for successful implementation of community- and problem-oriented policing.

A close look at the uses of mapping in police agencies indicates that successful application often involves people beyond the walls of a police agency. Current trends in policing require the cooperation of communities in the successful prevention of crime. Mapping has proven to be an effective tool in helping to build such partnerships. When shared with the community, the crime analysis potential provided by mapping serves as a stepping-stone for establishing cooperation between the police and the community that they serve.

The interaction between police and communities offers the potential for further analysis of data available for mapping. In their article in Crime Mapping and Crime Prevention (Weisburd and McEwan 1997), Buslick and Maltz illustrate how a community might be able to explain "hot spots" on a map through their own experience in a neighborhood—valuable information that cannot be gleaned by an analyst using any mapping method. The model that they present comes from the Chicago Police Department’s successful interaction with the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, a consortium of community groups. The data sharing and general cooperation resulting from this model proved so successful that the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) approved a further grant to continue the mapping projects implemented by this alliance (Buslick and Maltz 1997).

A 1998 NIJ study found that almost fifty percent of surveyed departments that use mapping use their analysis to inform the community (Nehabedian et al 1998). While this represents a small number of departments in real terms, it can serve as an indicator that this interaction is feasible. For example, the Washington County, Oregon, Sheriff’s Department includes a staff member who devotes considerable time to producing maps for community groups. The San Diego Police Department implements another strategy when distributing their mapping products to the public. Their Scanning Analysis Response Assessment (SARA) model incorporates technology made available by the Internet to distribute maps via a public website (Rose 1998).

For information about the Police Foundation’s role in the development of community policing, please go to About Community Policing. For a historical review of foundation projects relative to community policing, please go to Foundation Projects. For a list of foundation community policing titles in print and ordering information, please go to Publications List.

For more information about crime mapping in community policing, please contact Joe Ryan, (202) 721-9778, or email: jryan@policefoundation.org.