The Portland Police Bureau (Portland, Oregon) has been involved with geospatial analytics for about 17 years. Christy Khalifa, a Portland police crime analyst, has worked with the program for about two and a half years, though the Bureau has had geospatial tools for much longer. "We're pretty progressive as far as getting into new technology," she said. Indeed. The Bureau's Strategic Services Division, of which she is a member, developed, along with the Bureau of Technology Services, a public-facing Web-based CrimeMapper application that gets about 1.8 million hits a year. It's the second most popular service offered on the city's Portland Online site. The purpose of the application is to answer the public's questions about the safety of specific neighborhoods and the types of crimes that occur there.

"I love being able to put information like that out to the public because you can put so much information at their fingertips," explained Khalifa. It's fairly common for police departments to make this information available to the public, but not many offer information in a form as interactive as Portland's application, explained Khalifa. I played with the site and was impressed by how many different options and ways to look at data were available to public citizens. (A state-by-state listing of jurisdictions involved in "Crime Mapping" is available at the National Institute of Justice's site.)

Figure 1. I made this overview map using CrimeMapper on the Portland Police Bureau's site. Using half-mile grids, this general overview shows the prevalence of crime in this area. (I entered the address 1211 SW 5TH AVE. Unfamiliar with Portland, I just picked the address given as an example on the site.) (Click for larger image)

Figure 2. This map of the same location shows Part I crimes (a standard crime category used by all police departments) for the previous year. Note the chart at the bottom which shows the number of each Part I crime. Part II crimes are also available on separate maps and charts. You can click on a category to see a map of instances of that crime in particular, plus another chart indicating when crimes are taking place by month, day of week or time of day. Also provided is a drill-down list of every single instance of that crime, sortable by crime type, date or distance from the address originally entered. (Click for larger image)

 

 

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