In a word, place matters with crime. There’s an offender and a target, and opportunity. Hotspots – where crimes are clustered – are useful to know, to prevent future crimes, whether you install better lighting, or deploy guards, or simply close your business, and move somewhere safer! The Government has hailed police forces putting recorded crime data on the web, for all to see. Will this be a useful tool for security managers or will this prove another case of lies, damned lies and statistics? Mark Rowe asks.
Just as when siting a new shop, a business will want to know all the risks – of flooding, say – so crime data matters. Would a retailer be sensible to open a late-night pharmacy or convenience store in premises previously beset by hooligans, or break-ins? Or install a cash machine, in a district suffering from robberies from cash in transit couriers? As the Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science at University College London puts it: “If we can understand more about why certain places act as popular locations where offenders offend (ie crime hotspots), why certain areas breed more offenders than others, and why certain places or people are more vulnerable than others, then we can begin to more effectively get behind why crimes happen, become more intelligent in our policing, and design our operational policing, crime reduction and prevention responses to be more successful.” Nor is this all that new; UCL has run annual crime mapping conferences since 2003.
Geographic information systems (GIS) applied to crime have resulted in desktop computer mapping. to quote from the book Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis (published by Willan, reviewed last month): “Researchers are now able to quickly generate dynamically linked maps providing visual representations of the relationship between two or more characteristics, such as poverty rates and crime rates, for instance.” Note though that even the book does not go overboard about mapping. A high or low-crime area could happen just by chance: “Or it might reflect a spurious relationship in which crime and other observable conditions all result from some other unidentified cause. Affecting crime through intervention – by police or other agents – requires understanding the contributing factors and the nature of their relationshp to crime.”
On a personal level, such crime mapping might help a security manager give staff advice – or in a university, students – on safe routes to walk home. Or if no routes are safe, that could encourage bosses to subsidise buses or promote car-sharing. However, GIS like any computer programme works on the GIGO principle – garbage in, garbage out. In other words, if the input data is inaccurate or incomplete, so are the results, and reported and recorded crime is notoriously lower than actual crime – and nobody knows by how much. Also, accurate figures one year may become wrong as even small aspects of a neighbourhood changes. For instance, if a car park gains the Park Mark accreditation (www.parkmark.co.uk, featured last issue), great: but what if the low shrubbery grows and becomes a hiding place for drug deals and paraphernalia? Last year I walked past a central Glasgow private school at the end of the afternoon and in a play area across the road saw a dubious-looking man. Would a school, wishing to keep its good name, take kindly to showing up on a crime map? Equally, a business traveller with an English accent and entering some pubs in Belfast, certainly during the Troubles, might, in the words of one former policeman, leave ‘with his head in his hands’. How keen would a pub chain be to report such ‘minor’ disorder?
Of more use to the security professional than statistics always open to interpretation (and at the mercy of data inputters) may be schemes such as Secured by Design and insisting on doors, windows and so on with resistance to force. Crime science – or put another way, making sense of the crime world out there, and assessing how well any scheme of yours works – continues to be alluring. How about for instance giving your patrollers mobile computing with global positioning system (GPS) technology, to capture incidents of graffiti and vandalism? Maybe one day as in the Philip K Dick story Minority Report (filmed starring Tom Cruise) police will predict crime before it happens?
High-resolution aerial photography is set to assist Lincolnshire Police against crime and their response to major incidents.
The county force has taken delivery of a countywide GeoPerspectives aerial photomap, supplied by aerial survey company Bluesky. The photography is already being accessed by some users of the Force’s Intranet and work is also underway to integrate the photomap as a data layer within their geographical information system (GIS) so that the aerial photography can be viewed within the Force Command and Control System.
The Bluesky imagery is already being used within some Operational Orders and Contingency Plans, providing additional intelligence for the management of a wide range of incidents. Some users of Lincolnshire Police Force’s Intranet can currently access the photography at the desktop and it is intended that this capability will soon be made available to call takers and controllers within the Force Communications and Control Centre, enabling them to better identify and visualise locations as they are described to them by callers. This same facility will also be made available to help incident commanders manage their response when remote from the incident.
“’Aerial photography gives us important intelligence for managing the response to incidents and investigating incident scenes,” added Ian Watkins, Emergency Planning Officer for Lincolnshire Police. “Although it is early days of implementation within our command and control operations, we feel it will be a great asset in ensuring we can optimise resources and provide a fast and effective response.”
Lincolnshire is one of the largest and fastest growing rural counties in the UK, presenting police with challenges to serve the population. Intelligence extracted from the Bluesky aerial photography is already being used within Operational Orders and Contingency Plans for a wide variety of incidents. Site or area specific images can be used, in printed format by deployed staff or electronically as part of briefings, to give a more realistic view of what responding officers may be faced with when arriving at an incident and allowing unmapped features to be considered during the construction of plans.
It is intended that the Bluesky aerial photography will be introduced as a data layer within the Force’s GIS enabling images to be viewed instead of, or simultaneously with, normal map data within NSPIS Command and Control System. “It is not always possible to obtain aerial views of an ongoing incident scene,” continued Watkins. “Weather conditions, lack of helicopter resources or risk issues are common so this data will become an invaluable resource.”
GeoPerspectives is a joint venture between BlueSky and Infoterra providing national coverage of orthorectified aerial photography, digital terrain and surface models (DTM/DSM) for 3D modelling.
