Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Spencer Chainey is the author of GIS and Crime Mapping, published by Wiley.

Jerry Ratcliffe is the author of GIS and Crime Mapping, published by Wiley.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The growing potential of GIS for supporting policing and crime reduction is now being recognised by a broader community. GIS can be employed at different levels to support operational policing, tactical crime mapping, detection, and wider-ranging strategic analyses. With the use of GIS for crime mapping increasing, this book provides a definitive reference.

GIS and Crime Mapping provides essential information and reference material to support readers in developing and implementing crime mapping. Relevant case studies help demonstrate the key principles, concepts and applications of crime mapping.

This book combines the topics of theoretical principles, GIS, analytical techniques, data processing solutions, information sharing, problem-solving approaches, map design, and organisational structures for using crime mapping for policing and crime reduction. Delivered in an accessible style, topics are covered in a manner that underpins crime mapping use in the three broad areas of operations, tactics and strategy.

• Provides a complete start-to-finish coverage of crime mapping, including theory, scientific methodologies, analysis techniques and design principles.
• Includes a comprehensive presentation of crime mapping applications for operational, tactical and strategic purposes.
• Includes global case studies and examples to demonstrate good practice.
• Co-authored by Spencer Chainey, a leading researcher and consultant on GIS and crime mapping, and Jerry Ratcliffe, a renowned professor and former police officer.

This book is essential reading for crime analysts and other professionals working in intelligence roles in law enforcement or crime reduction, at the local, regional and national government levels. It is also an excellent reference for undergraduate and Masters students taking courses in GIS, Geomatics, Crime Mapping, Crime Science, Criminal Justice and Criminology.

Aus dem Klappentext

The growing potential of GIS for supporting policing and crime reduction is now being recognised by a broader community. GIS can be employed at different levels to support operational policing, tactical crime mapping, detection, and wider-ranging strategic analyses. With the use of GIS for crime mapping increasing, this book provides a definitive reference.

GIS and Crime Mapping provides essential information and reference material to support readers in developing and implementing crime mapping. Relevant case studies help demonstrate the key principles, concepts and applications of crime mapping.

This book combines the topics of theoretical principles, GIS, analytical techniques, data processing solutions, information sharing, problem-solving approaches, map design, and organisational structures for using crime mapping for policing and crime reduction. Delivered in an accessible style, topics are covered in a manner that underpins crime mapping use in the three broad areas of operations, tactics and strategy.

• Provides a complete start-to-finish coverage of crime mapping, including theory, scientific methodologies, analysis techniques and design principles.
• Includes a comprehensive presentation of crime mapping applications for operational, tactical and strategic purposes.
• Includes global case studies and examples to demonstrate good practice.
• Co-authored by Spencer Chainey, a leading researcher and consultant on GIS and crime mapping, and Jerry Ratcliffe, a renowned professor and former police officer.

This book is essential reading for crime analysts and other professionals working in intelligence roles in law enforcement or crime reduction, at the local, regional and national government levels.  It is also an excellent reference for undergraduate and Masters students taking courses in GIS, Geomatics, Crime Mapping, Crime Science, Criminal Justice and Criminology.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

GIS and Crime Mapping

John Wiley & Sons

Chapter One

1.1 The geography of crime

Crime has an inherent geographical quality. When a crime occurs, it happens at a place with a geographical location. For someone to have committed a crime they must have also come from a place (such as their home, work or school). This place could be the same location where the crime was committed or is often close to where the crime was perpetrated (Frisbie et al., 1977; Brantingham and Brantingham, 1981; Rossmo, 2000; Wiles and Costello, 2000). 'Place' therefore plays a vital role in understanding crime and how crime can be tackled.

The study of crime has traditionally been the preserve of other disciplines such as sociology and psychology (Georges, 1978) and it was not until the late 1970s that the 'place' and the spatial dimension to crime began to be more fully explored. The police have long recognised the inherent geographical component of crime by sticking pins into maps displayed on walls, where each pin represented a crime event, but it was studies such as those from the 'Chicago School' of the 1930s (Shaw and McKay, 1931) that first demonstrated the importance of geography in understanding crime.

What has taken time, and only seriously surfaced in the 1970s, was the realisation that crime could be explained and understood in more depth by exploring its geographical components. New techniques emerged - techniques that included identifying patterns and concentrations of crime; the exploration of the relationships between crime and environmental or socio-economic characteristics; and techniques to assess the effectiveness of policing and crime reduction programmes that are targeted to geographical areas. What has materialised from this emergence of academic and practitioner activity is the field of crime mapping - a progressive blend of practical criminal justice issues with the research field of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

1.2 A brief history of GIS and crime mapping

Since the 1960s GIS has emerged as a discipline in its own right. From its origins in land use applications in Canada to an all-pervasive technology used today in applications as diverse as in-car navigation, retail store site location, customer targeting, risk management, construction, weather forecasting, utilities management and military planning, GIS has become ubiquitous in modern life.

The infancy of GIS grew through applications such as planning for the US Census of Population in 1970 (and other national censuses in many other countries since) and from the national mapping agencies that began using this technology to help automate their cartographic draughting. Imagery of the earth from satellites has also played a significant role in the development of GIS, particularly through the military where GIS was the platform into which imagery could be displayed and analysed for the purpose of intelligence gathering. Indeed it was the military that were responsible for the first uniform system of measuring location, driven by the need for accurately targeting missiles. The military were also initially responsible for the development of the Global Positioning System (GPS). However, it was not until the 1980s that reductions in the price of computer technology created a conducive environment for the development of the GIS software industry and the subsequent growth in cost-effective GIS applications (Longley et al., 2001).

These reductions in the cost of computer hardware were complemented by improved operating systems, electronic storage media and developments in computer software, and have had a wide and significant impact in introducing GIS technologies to new areas, such as policing and crime reduction. The computerisation of police records has come with a realisation that this material can be used for crime and intelligence analysis (Ratcliffe, 2004), and in turn used to better recognise patterns of crime that can be targeted for action, patterns that evidence suggests police officers are not necessarily aware of (Ratcliffe and McCullagh, 2001).

The early use of GIS for mapping crime was often held back by organisational and management problems (Openshaw et al., 1990), issues with sharing information (Chainey, 2001), technical problems (Hirschfield et al., 1995) and geocoding problems (Craglia et al., 2000). These problems were shared with many of the other industries and disciplines trying to implement GIS, and it took several innovators to resolve these issues and show how they could be overcome. In reality many of these problems have not simply gone away, and several new ones have emerged, so in this book we try to help the reader by pointing to ways in which many of these technical and organisational issues can be overcome.

Much of the innovation in crime mapping was driven in the United States by the National Institute of Justice's Crime Mapping Research Center (CMRC). Renamed in 2002 as the Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety (MAPS) programme, the impact of this US government initiative was not isolated to the USA, but has also been the foundation for the development of crime mapping in many other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa and across South America. The MAPS programme has raised awareness of crime mapping through arranging seminars, conferences and producing publications, and by developing crime mapping software tools and funding new fields of crime mapping research. The MAPS programme, joined now by many other institutions and organisations, continues to be an active player in supporting the development of crime mapping with the result that crime mapping is now more widely recognised by government and law enforcement services as a tool to aid policing and crime reduction.

Many argue that the 'systems' development of GIS has in recent years been overtaken by the 'scientific' development of the discipline (Goodchild, 1992, 1997; Longley et al., 2001). This geographical information science has seen the development of analytical methodologies, techniques and processes for the advancement of spatial understanding, and as a result has contributed to many disciplines where understanding space and place is important, such as with crime (Ratcliffe, 2004). The geographical analysis of crime has also shown strong parallels with the field of spatial epidemiology and continues today to learn from this related field, using many of the analysis techniques that were originally designed for the study of disease patterns. We cover a number of these techniques in this book.

1.3 Using GIS in policing and to prevent crime

Crime mapping can play an important role in the policing and crime reduction process, from the first stage of data collection through to the monitoring and evaluation of any targeted response. It can also act as an important mechanism in a more pivotal preliminary stage, that of preventing crime by helping in the design of initiatives that are successful in tackling a crime problem. In subsequent sections of this book we present and discuss a wide range of applications for crime mapping, but as a resume to demonstrate how it can support many central processes to policing and crime reduction we include the following application areas:

Recording and mapping police activity, crime reduction projects, calls for service and crime incidents;

Supporting the briefing of operational police officers...