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Hot Spot Policing Reduces Crime in Real World Experiment

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Brad Rutledge

Today there is an abundance of theories about different strategies and tactics police departments can implement to reduce crime and save tax payer money. Unfortunately, like many theories, they can be difficult to measure, and prove – or disprove.

I recently came across an article in Dispatch called A Hot Spot Experiment: Sacramento Police Department that took the so-called Koper curve theory of hot spot policing, and put it to a real world test.

The Sacramento Police Department tested out the theory, which states that certain neighborhoods or locations will have an unequal distribution of crime when compared to other locations in the same area. The higher crime areas are called hot spots, and the theory says that when there is a visible police presence in these hot spots, crime will drop.

The CommandCentral Heat Map shows density of crime by time per agency patrolling area.

The experiment outlined a ranking of Hot Spots, and two separate groups (Hot Spot Policing, and Routine Patrols) were assigned. Hot Spot Policing was defined as having police officers who are highly visible in the assigned Hot Spot for 12-16 minutes every two hours.

The Sacramento Police Department tested the theory over a three month period. Following are some of the findings of that real world study:

Crimes in areas that used Hot Spot Policing decreased by 25 percent
Officer productivity improved due to Hot Spot Policing
Hot Spot Policing lead to significant cost savings (almost $300,000 over the three month period)

So, while this is only one real world experiment that seemed to show benefits to implementing the Koper curve theory of hot spot policing, more research can be done. I also found it interesting to see how vitally important accurate crime data and statistics are to implementing a technique such as Hot Spot Policing. Accurate crime data allowed Sacramento PD to identify Hot Spots, and track the impact of its experiment. Ultimately it seems, having the ability to collect, track, and analyze crime data, leads to better knowledge, and thus better decision-making.

Congratulations to the Sacrament Police Department for using their data to implement Intelligence Led Policing systems that lower crime, and save money. To read more about this experiment, visit http://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/06-2012/hot-spots-and-sacramento-pd.asp

Intelligence Led Policing Yardsticks: Training

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Detective Seals

So what if I told you that I had a new pistol for your officers to use? This is no ordinary pistol, oh no, this pistol will improve your officers’ range scores by 20% across the board, the ammo will cost 50% less than what you are paying now, and each pistol comes with its own level 9 holster! What is level 9 you say? Well it’s a new safety level that we have invented that will improve your officers’ weapon retention ability! Does the new holster require training to use you ask? Well sure….or you can just hand them out and see what happens.

Of course none of you would send your officers out onto the road without the proper training, especially with something as eternally important as their weapon. Now, I have not invented a great new weapon or a “level 9″ holster for it. Sorry. The point I want to make is that training is at the heart of all good departments. When we receive new equipment, before we hand it out and send our troops on their way, we train them in the proper use of that new equipment. Without proper training, we cannot expect our officers to perform to their best ability. The same is absolutely true for Intelligence Led Policing.

Don’t Be Too Cool For School

In this blog series, we have covered a massive amount of information about Intelligence Led Policing. If any of you who have followed my blog series so far have not at some point thought, “I bet this takes some training to implement,” then I’d say you’ve hit the nail on the head. Please understand, starting with an Intelligence Led Policing

methodology is no small change. It is a major shift that must be embraced and trained upon by the entire department. And although it is tempting to place “someone” into the role of Intel Analyst role, please do not make the mistake of only expecting them to be trained in the proper implementation and use of Intelligence Led Policing. This ultimately places your brand new Intel Analyst into the unenviable position of having to complete Intel reports and then explain to those for whom he prepared the reports for as to why he did it this way and the methodology behind it. You will soon find that your new analyst will be spending more time explaining reports then analyzing reports. Now, I understand that you may have budgetary or time concerns when it comes to training to this scale; as a matter of fact, an Assistant Chief of Police from Michigan and I were discussing this very issue recently. But what we both agreed upon is that if we fully believe that something will greatly enhance the crime fighting abilities of our officers and thus improve the safety of our citizens, we can generally find the funding for it.

So, what does this training look like?

Here are some guidelines to go by when looking for a training program.

Make sure the program:

-Facilitates skills of all rank levels. While not every officer is an analyst, every officer should understand the goal of the analysis. It’s what I like to call, from the Chief to the Street. Your patrol officers – or street cops – should understand basic reporting without the need for long meetings or extended multi-day training courses to explain them. Likewise, in time, they may even learn to pull basic reports themselves.

-Teaches training methods to key members of the department in order to enable them to do entry level training for their officers.

-Uses visual aids in order to demonstrate the true visual efficacy of Intelligence Led Policing

-Monitors and evaluates each student throughout the training in order to accurately gauge their individual performance

-Has a practicum at the end of the training, to ensure success.

-All students should receive post training feedback and continuing education goals.

Now the big question, where do you obtain such training? Well, I obtained my training from The Alpha Group Center for Crime & Intelligence Analysis Training. Although they are based in California, I did not have to travel to them. They taught their training program at my state training facility.

Now, there are other organizations that have intelligence training programs. I encourage you to contact your state training facility, local colleges or universities, or perhaps a software vendor that you use to see what they have to offer. But I will also say that it has been my experience that many of these organizations teach Crime & Intelligence Analysis to the individual analyst — but not exactly how to implement Intelligence Led Policing within your department for everyone. Ask a lot of questions to better understand what core student profiles their material targets. It is of the utmost importance that any training on the subject includes a holistic and inclusive effort to educate all force members. As Chief William Bratton once said in 2007, speaking about Intelligence Led Policing, ” … Currently, without a national strategy, or a place where police executives can learn how to implement ILP, it is sitting on the shelf unused.”

Intelligence Led Policing isn’t another fad. And it isn’t a wave of the future. It’s here. It’s among us. And for the few agencies that are fully embracing it, it is paying dividends in the form of more accurate intel that leads to more effective policing decisions that ultimately lower crime.

Intelligence Led Policing Yardsticks: Data Cleansing and Management

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Detective Seals

So let’s start piling in the data! Right?

Not just yet cowboy; pull back the reigns for just a minute. I know you’re anxious to get your Intelligence Led Policing initiative up and running, but don’t skip the most important step: making sure the data you are going to feed into your intelligence system isn’t garbage! We’ve all heard the term, “garbage in, garbage out.” Well, the data integration between an RMS/CAD system with an analytics solution is where that term really comes to life. So many agencies I speak to have unwittingly made the mistake of pushing data into an intelligence system without vetting that data first. What makes it worse is that most of these agencies won’t figure out that they pushed bad data into their system until they begin to get results from that system that doesn’t make sense. Some of the most common results they will see as a result of bad data are:

Maps will be a mess
Multiple crime types getting bulked together (think murder, rape, theft, lumped together in an “other” category)
And generally, their numbers won’t jive with what they know to be true

So let’s talk about your data; I mean really talk about why it is so important to spend time on your existing data set to make sure that it is clean, standardized, and accurate. Don’t assume that your data set is correct. It may be a difficult thing for you to do, but I want you to assume that you data set is “generally” correct, but needs verification before it is trusted. As President Reagan said so often, “Trust, but verify”. Now don’t get me wrong, you can certainly use your existing data, as it sits, without verification, for your intelligence initiative. You can pull intelligence from that un-vetted data set and distribute that intelligence throughout your department. But, without verifying your data, your intelligence will be wrong.

Data verification is the key to good intelligence.

So how do you verify your data? Here are a few areas to check in what I would consider the most common error categories, and steps to take to correct any mistakes you may find.

1. Maps - Most commonly our mapping data, whether from GIS, Google, Lat/Long, or address, is far from perfect. As a matter of my experience, I would say that maps are one of the most inaccurate, yet one of the most desired data sets for an agency.

Crime map data comes from a variety of technologies.

Meaning, we all want good maps, but very few of us actually have such.

Why? – There are a multitude of reasons that our maps leave a lot to be desired, such as: inaccurate input from our officers and dispatch, duplicate addresses resulting from some unknown oddity in city planning, and GIS, Google and other mapping systems simply putting the map point in the wrong place. Very few of these, other than officer/dispatch mistake, are under our control. This is what makes the mapping issue such a big problem, many of us just throw up our hands and exclaim, “it’s out of my control, so we’ll just have to live with it.”

Effect – By leaving bad mapping to its own devices, we are allowing our data to be tainted. In essence, we are saying, we don’t really care about those crimes that are mapped incorrectly, we will just rely on the crimes that are mapped correctly. Of course, this is false logic because, as we all know, especially Intelligence Led Policing should be an “all crimes” approach. With an “all crimes” approach, we know we are getting the entire picture. Without it, we are only getting a biased view.

Solution – The first step is training – make sure your officers and dispatchers are entering the addresses correctly. After that is done, choose a software solution, such as the one I use, CommandCentral by PublicEngines, that allows you to identify incorrect mapping points and move them to their correct location. I have seen many software solutions, records management systems included, that allow the user to see incorrect mapping points, but very few allow the user to move those bad points to where they really need to be. CommandCentral, however, has gone one step further than just allowing you to identify and move your mapping points, it has streamlined that entire process down to just a few clicks of the mouse. I am able to look at all of my crimes over a particular date range in the entire city, un-click my zone designations, and then click a tab called “outside” that shows all of my crimes that mapped outside of my zone designations. I can utilize the administration tools to move mis-mapped crimes to their proper location. A quick solution to a menacing problem.

2. Crime Types – Used widely by agencies to easily designate the difference between certain crimes, such as Burglary Residential and Burglary Commercial, these designations have quickly gotten out of hand in many jurisdictions. What I mean by out of hand is that many agencies have found themselves with so many crime types, some have 400, 500, or more, that they have a hard time keeping the designations separate.

Why? – Let’s face it, so many times it is much easier for an officer to pick Theft/Other than it is to find the exact designation that the crime demands, especially when there are so many options. Whats more is that in so many records management systems, in order to run a report on a parent crime type such as theft, you have to run multiple individual reports on each crime type designation within that parent theft designation. And sometimes, an officer incorrectly categorizes a crime. He may write a burglary report, when in actuality, it should have been a theft report.

Effect – You find your data is scattered all over your records management system. For instance, in order to run a report of the thefts in your jurisdiction, you have to go to multiple report tables, run multiple reports, and then you still have to compile, generally manually, all of those records into one document.

Solution – Like Maps, the first step is training. Make sure you train your staff the proper way to designate each crime and more than that, make sure they know why it is so important to properly designate each crime. The second step then is to revert back to your software solution to make this whole process easier for you. I again refer to CommandCentral, it allows me to easily bulk my various crime types into easy-to-understand quick tabs. Meaning then, that all of my various thefts are bulked into one tab simply called “Theft,” while still allowing me to just choose one type of theft and generate a report on it alone if needed. The system also allows me to bulk these crime types myself. That way, if I want to move a specific crime type to another category, I can do so with ease.

3. Numbers – Truly at the heart of the matter aren’t they? The chief wants them, the city council wants them, even the FBI wants them. But if the data problems we spoke of earlier are not right, then your numbers are surely off as well.

Why? – There is a direct correlation between your numbers being off and the data supporting your numbers being off. As go the earlier topics, so goes your numbers, and so on.

Effect – So many times we are in a rush to get the numbers out that we forget the correlation. As a result of putting out bad numbers, we all look poorly to those we have created the report for. We are working with something the likes of a living organism, all parts must work together for all the parts to work correctly.

Solution – Begin by correcting all of the areas that you would get your numbers from, such as the areas we spoke of earlier. Please be diligent about this. You must understand that if your data sets are not correct, then there is no way your numbers, which come from those data sets, can be correct.

In closing, I want us to all remember an old saying some of us were taught in mandate school: “The Fruits of the Poisonous Tree.” Use it as a guide for our Intelligence Led Policing. If we use bad data (the poisonous tree) in our intelligence initiative, then the intelligence that we get out of that bad data (the fruit), is corrupt, misleading, and all around garbage. Your Intelligence Led Policing initiative lives and dies on the quality of the data you feed it. Feed it good, accurate data, and it will thrive, feed it fruits of the poisonous tree and it will wither and die.

Intelligence Led Policing Yardsticks – Department-wide Roll Out

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Detective Seals

All Aboard The ILP Train

No, this article is not about trains, but chances are the sub-title has got you wondering. When you think about it, the concept of Intelligence Led Policing is not unlike a train itself. A train is “a series of railroad cars moved as a unit by a locomotive or by integral motors.” So when you speak of a train, you speak of all of the cars linked together moving down the track toward one common destination.This analogy should be the same for the functionality of our departments. Theoretically we should be moving toward the same destination. Unfortunately that’s not often the case.

In my last blog entry I wrote that to introduce Intelligence Led Policing to your department first required a supportive and informed command structure. So now that our command structure has bought in to the concept, we need that information to be distributed throughout the entire department. Easier said than done. As law-enforcement entities we have a tendency to compartmentalize ourselves into different divisions or groups. The great majority of which have a purposeful and utilitarian role; patrol units, criminal investigation units, crime scene units, community outreach units, support services units, and the list goes on. However, these necessary yet compartmentalized units are a double edged sword. What I mean is, all of this compartmentalization adds to one of our departments greatest hurdles: where the right-hand doesn’t know what the left-hand is doing. We all know and experience this problem day in and day out. No matter which of these units you find yourself in, very seldom do you understand the scope of direction of each individual department.

Department-wide Roll Out

It is for this very reason that when you implement Intelligence Led Policing into your organization, it is imperative that you move forward with a Department-wide Roll Out. Do not fall victim to the line of thinking that says the only person(s) in your department that needs to be trained in Intelligence Led Policing are those that are in your ILP division. This is the same line of thinking that believes ILP can work based on ILP staff issuing reports to the department anchored solely on the training and information only the ILP staff know. In reality that kind of thinking just leads to a lack of trust and belief in the system because it all hovers around one individual or a group of individuals that seem to “hold the keys.” Allow your trained Intelligence Led Policing staff to introduce and train the rest of your department in how the methodology works and how each department member can and should have a role in the process. This way everyone becomes a stakeholder with key roles and responsibilities, guiding them to take ownership in the program’s success. This approach holds true for departments large and small – even those that can’t afford to have an ILP division with multiple people in it. No matter how you decide to implement Intelligence Led Policing into your agency, it must be implemented and trained upon at a departmental scale.

Here’s a Few Steps to Follow

Evaluate Technology Vendors – What vendors offer industry specific analytics solutions? Define a list of feature must haves versus nice to haves. Look at how any given system handles your RMS/CAD data, what feature sets it has (and what those allow you to do), how it secures your data, what type of support is provided by the company, how long a typical implementation and training takes, and of course cost. Note: while it isn’t totally necessary to make a technology purchase, the point is to develop new insights from analyzing your data over time in a rapid, on-demand manner. Manual analysis requires detailed manipulation that can take days or weeks to build reports – instead of minutes.
Introductory Meeting – Be prepared to introduce ILP to your agency in a series of meetings held with one to two departments at a time. You’ll want to define it, illustrate current agency pain points, describe goals with moving towards this methodology, and present a plan with a timeline for a full roll out.
Data Management - You’ve got to have a basic understanding of your data. Make sure your crime reports correlate to the appropriate crime types. They should also include date, time, location, and detailed notes. Some analytics solutions will help you clean your data so that you get valuable information out of your systems. But you still need to understand how that data has been entered into the system over the years. This may be a painful process, but will reap rewards that in the end allow you to make tactical decisions that help you lower crime.
Create Expectations - Moving towards an ILP model – while directed by the people in charge of intelligence – requires multiple stakeholders to pitch in. From analysts, to command staff, to officers, and dispatch, there should be clear training and expectations on how new systems will be used and processes followed.
Support Expectations With Training - In order to make sure all agency members are on the same page, prepare entry level training into how to conduct ILP and how to use new systems. Understand that some people will learn by listening and others need visuals. Don’t just talk about the new system. Be ready to open it, walk through it, and show the trainees basic functionality. Also, tailor your presentation to your audience. If your analysts will use the technology differently than your command staff (and they should), make sure you show each audience how they can use it to their specific benefit. Conducting online training? Record the session so people can follow up. To do all this you may need to bring in your technology provider to conduct the training. Reputable vendors will provide this as part of their package/service. Additionally, some will have options for consultancy. An consultant will be able to review your data, set up your systems, and take a deep dive with your intelligence person(s) in a way that goes beyond basic training.
Follow Up – Prepare follow up emails with tips and best practices throughout the year following the launch of your ILP initiative. It’s important to continually positively reinforce what your staff can do with the system. Schedule group meetings from time-to-time to illustrate key points. And finally, report results on a monthly basis so that everyone in the agency can see how this methodology is making an impact in the community.

In my first year of moving to ILP and integrating an new analytics solution we were able to gain insights and make field-level decisions that ultimately led to a 20% reduction in FBI part 1 crimes. The downward trend continued in the two years that followed. If you’re interested in learning more about how to get started, send me a note at daniel.seals@publicengines.com, I’d be glad to have a chat with you. Stay tuned for my next entry in this Yardsticks for Intelligence Led Policing series.

Mapping Technology Delivers Powerful Information, Leads to Smarter Decisions

Posted on February 4, 2013 by Brad Rutledge

David Weisburd and Tom McEwen opened their groundbreaking 1997 paper, Mapping and Crime Prevention, with an interesting bit of trivia. The first known case of mapping occurred in London during a cholera outbreak in 1854. Dr. John Snow plotted the deaths on a map of the city and compared them to the locations of water pumps throughout the afflicted neighborhood. Through investigation, Dr. Snow was able to pinpoint the exact source of the cholera, and end the outbreak.

Original map made by John Snow in 1854. Cholera cases are highlighted in black.

Today mapping has evolved into a high-tech information motherlode. Applications on smart phones can find you the nearest Starbucks in a matter of seconds. But for all the convenience these consumer-oriented maps offer, none is more important than those mapping crimes.

As a parent, the safety of my kids is my number one priority in making more decisions than I can count. It influences which houses I’ve bought, which schools they attend, sometimes even which restaurants we frequent or events we visit. I want to know my family will be safe.

Take for example, when we were looking at buying a new house. After touring a home, looking in closets, measuring the space in bedrooms, and driving around the neighborhood, we’d always pull up the local crime mapping site when we got back to our place.

Some houses were dropped from our list within a few minutes after seeing the crimes report. Seeing a series of thefts within a few blocks of the house was a deal breaker for us.

But even more important to us was locating sex offenders in the area. One house we liked in a seemingly quiet neighborhood fell off our list immediately after we saw that a registered sex offender lived down the street.

Please don’t misunderstand, we believe in second chances for everyone after a person has paid his or her debt to society. But for us the risk of our children’s safety – even theoretically – far outweighed the house’s many attributes.

Having access to the knowledge of what crimes have occurred in near real-time is an incredible tool for everyone. And the more crimes that are mapped every year the more efficacious crime mapping becomes as a tool for overall community safety.

The engagement with local police departments mapping offers is an important added benefit. I’ve always been a firm believer that communities are safest when police and citizens work together. Mapping provides transparency about the crimes in my area. It offers members of the community the opportunity to proactively help in solving and reducing crimes by offering police tips and helping citizens make informed decisions.

Most importantly, mapping gives me an incredibly valuable benefit: the knowledge to empower myself. It helps me make educated decisions to protect my family.

Right now, CrimeReports has 80-million crimes mapped. That’s a staggering number. It is also an empowering number. The more we know, the more we can react and help to bring those numbers down. It will be great day when we start seeing fewer and fewer crimes mapped, because it will mean our society is measurably safer. I think Dr. Snow would be very proud.