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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.

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.

Crime Data – What to Do With Your Data and How to Share it

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Detective Seals

This is part four in a multi-part series on Intelligence-Led Policing

Crime Maps, Charts, Graphs – Oh My

So you have all this data, now what to do with it. This is your next stumbling block along the road to true Intelligence-Led Policing. Many agencies make the mistake of thinking data itself is intelligence, this is simply not the case. Truly, very little is further from the truth when it comes to Intelligence-Led Policing. Data is the brick and mortar upon which intelligence is built, but like lone bricks, without being put together properly, it will not support anything.
So, how do you put all of your newly found data together so that it can work for you and your staff?

There are a number of ways to present your data; the best rule of thumb for this is to know your staff. How does your staff best understand data, maps, charts, graphs, etc.? Most cops are visual learners, so if you are unsure of the answer to the previous question, maps are a great place to start. So let’s use maps as our example. Cops know their beats; start with a map showing the crime in each beat/zone for the last month. But don’t stop there, do the same map for the last three months for comparison and the same months last year. When you have created these maps, it will be clear that your jurisdiction has crime patterns. Don’t keep the maps for yourself, distribute them to your staff and teach them how to recognize the normal patterns from the abnormal.

Charts, crime maps, graphs and any other way you choose to distribute your intelligence can be intimidating to your staff. Keep in mind, they may have never seen information presented to them in this way and moreover they have never been expected to fully embrace something so new and so foreign in a quick manner. I have found that using staff meetings to first teach your command staff how to understand this new approach, is the best way to introduce them. If you can wow them, they will spread the word to the rest of the staff.

So, how to wow them……show them the crime patterns we spoke of earlier, show them that the crime in your jurisdiction is predictable from year to year and therefore, month to month. I did just this in one of my very first staff meetings. I presented a graph that showed that our part one crimes for the last three years were predictable within a variable of 25 to 30 crimes, some within 5 to 10 crimes. You want an attention getter, that’s an attention getter! Within 15 minutes of the conclusion of the staff meeting, I had front line officers at my office door asking about my “crystal ball.”

“Why Intelligence-Led Policing? The Answer”

Posted on August 30, 2012 by Detective Seals

This is part two of a multi-part series on Intelligence-Led Policing written by Detective Daniel Seals of the Covington, GA Police Department. Stay tuned each Thursday for a new entry.

Why Intelligence-Led Policing

Well, because you are probably already doing it and just don’t realize it. Ask any of your veteran officers, “where are our highest crime areas?”or “who do we deal with the most?” They’ll all have answers for you, and they’ll all sound pretty similar. This is what Intelligence-Led Policing is all about though — taking the information you already have and doing something useful with it. That last part is usually the gap in most departments; doing something with it. Officers have actionable intelligence, but rarely do they put it to use or share it with other officers and command staff. There is for a multitude of reasons. For instance, officers are told; “stay in your zone/beat”, “drive around and make sure the public sees you”, “don’t get in to anything so you can answer your calls.” These are all generally good tenants of policing, but they don’t allow for an intelligence-led, focused way of policing.

Focus on High Crime Areas

If you know where your crime is generally and where it isn’t generally, then why not focus your patrols in the areas where crime is? This sounds pretty obvious, but all too often policing turns into a game of, “drive around and see if you find something while answering calls in between.” This is akin to the “spray and pray” method of firearms, where you fire your weapon multiple times in multiple directions with the assumption that you will surely hit something. We would never teach our officers to do this. We teach them to be precise and exacting on the firearms range. How about using the same precision and exacting nature in the rest of their job? Why not go to where you know the crime is and hang out there until you get a call? I guarantee your mere increased presence in these high crime areas will at the very least disrupt the criminal element in these areas. By no means am I suggesting a neglect of the other areas of your city or township, but rather a focus on the higher crime areas. This is, of course, a very elementary break down of Intelligence-Led Policing — it’s also an illustration of a starting point.

Extract Individual Information and Compile it Holistically

Intelligence-Led Policing starts with taking all of the information your officers already have, coupling it with other local, state, and federal intelligence, adding it to the crime data you have compiled in you records, and finally, mixing it together to create an intelligence product that your entire department can use. Again, this is not far from what you are doing now, it’s just a more structured way of putting it all together and most importantly getting it out to your officers so they can use it every day, all day.

Between now and my next entry, I encourage you to make a list of all the different information sources that you currently have access to. Because in my next blog, I will describe how to compile this information, make it accessible, and actually get your officers to “buy in” to this new way of policing.

Crime Rates on the Rise, No One is Safe. Reality?

Posted on July 24, 2012 by admin

Media Thrives on Audience Attention

The first recording of sensationalism with regards to journalism took place in about 1840 according to Merriam-Webster.com. And throughout the years, modern media outlets have been well known to camp out on topics and stories that draw audiences – crime, sex, and polarizing statements that run against the grain of the general societal value. These topics and others like them have a way of drawing and keeping attention. And while the original goal of news organizations was to inform the public of community-based current events with impartiality, today’s goal is to drive revenue through ad dollars. The thought here is, the longer you keep an individual on your page or glued to your channel, the more valuable your ad space is to advertisers and the higher your potential revenues.

So if the goal is higher revenue, why would the media choose to focus on other topics? Mind you there is nothing wrong per se with media coverage on these topics. After all if an audience grows weary, they go away – a natural process of a free enterprise system. But the result of a long attention span on any one issue shapes sociological mindset that may not necessarily reflect reality.

Take the perception of crime for instance. The typical adult will tell you that crime is up, that our communities are less safe then they were 40 years ago, and that they can’t possibly allow their children to play outside by themselves. In fact a Gallup Poll in 2007 noted that 7 in 10 people believe crime is on the rise. In short, there is a social conscience being shaped that leads the average individual to believe that our police agencies could be doing more, that our politicians are all crooked, and that our tax dollars are being to wasted.

Numbers Trump Perception

However perception is sometimes different from reality. According to the Unified Crime Report (UCR) composed by the FBI, violent crime is down 13.4% throughout the nation from 2001-2010.

And across the board, in other categories, statistics tell a similar story – violent crime, property crime, and numbers of persons arrested have all decreased over the same time frame.

Show Crime Statistics in a Palatable Format

So how can police departments inform a citizenry that crime is down, communities are safer, and mandated officials are by-in-large doing an admirable job?

One of the quickest and most influential ways to reach a population is through the very media that focuses on the crime to draw audiences in the first place. But in order to convince the media that crime is actually down, police departments need to prove it with facts and figures. Over the last five years crime maps and agency crime mapping has given rise to data visualization tools – that is, technology that makes it easier for the average individual to understand crime trends through graphs, charts, and heat maps. Many agencies have been taking crime reports housed in their RMS and placing incidents on a map – like our very own CrimeReports.com. This allows the general public to see for them themselves the crime that is taking place around them and allows them to make informed decisions about their response to crime, where they choose to live, work, and even vacation.

Another tool born from data visualization are products that focus on crime analytics. Agencies are using crime analysis to create new policing methodologies that help departments reduce crime even further, in some cases prevent it altogether, and finally, build reports that can in turn be used to show the public actual crime trends.

And of course there is social media. The latest Facebook numbers show a community of around 900 million users. And according to SocialBakers.com, nearly 50% of the US population has an account. When comparing that with Internet users, the number rises to 65% of all people on the net in the US are on the social network. Agencies have been using the platform for detective work for some time – Mashable recently noting that a poll of 1200 agencies where 85% use social media to solve crime and track down perpetrators. But what if you gave your community reason to follow you on Facebook or Twitter? An agency who utilized those tools — updating it daily in order to shape opinion through fact – now becomes its own news source and perception has no way of being distorted in the first place.

The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword

So if knowledge is power and the media uses it to attract an audience, why can’t you? In fact we’re interested to hear what you think. Sound off in the comments section below. How you’re utilizing technology and communications to impact community perception regarding public safety and agency effectiveness?