UF Teams With Police Department On Crime Mapping Program

June 16, 2000

GAINESVILLE, Fla.—In a unique partnership between police and academia, University of Florida researchers are tailoring satellite-related mapping software to help police track crimes and allocate resources more efficiently.

Professors and graduate students in the UF department of urban and regional planning’s GeoPlan Center have worked for about a year creating a spatial crime analysis system for the Gainesville Police Department. The new program will save officers’ time and taxpayers’ money by helping pinpoint trends in crime more accurately, putting police officers where they are needed most.

Sadie Darnell, Operations Bureau commander at the Gainesville Police Department, said with UF’s resources and the more efficient way of analyzing crime, the police department’s expenses will not significantly increase.

“Money will be saved by reducing the amount of time personnel have to spend searching for the information we hope to provide,” she said.

Priscilla Zardo, a graduate student working on the project, agreed that the software will make crime analysts’ jobs easier.

“What will change a lot for them is the way they visualize information and the way they can analyze the data,” Zardo said. “The system they had before was just printed reports. They had to make their own mental maps or make the maps by hand.”

Zardo said the Geographic Information System overlays several types of information such as roads, crime hot spots, census, utilities and satellite images on one map with the click of the mouse. She said it will save crime analysts hours of work by letting them find complex patterns of crime they previously were unable to track.

Designing the program to be user-friendly was a major factor in choosing what kind of mapping program to use. Zardo said they chose ArcView GIS with a crime analysis extension customized for the police department because it requires less training than regular GIS software does.

Richard Schneider, graduate coordinator for UF’s planning department and associate director of GeoPlan, said the Gainesville project is unique among similar projects elsewhere.

“Most (agencies) have had professional consultant teams,” Schneider said. “Here, it’s the university and … students working with the police department.”

Darnell said one of the greatest advantages of the collaboration is that because UF is local, her department will get extended support and development for years to come. “A private vendor may be based across the country, and they have little ownership in the project,” she said.

Schneider agreed.

“UF is invested and interested in the project,” he said. “It allows [the police department] to be closer to cutting-edge technology and ideas.”

Zardo said researchers and police hope to have the software installed by the end of July and have the crime analysts trained by September.

Since the advent of crime mapping technology in the 1960′s, Schneider said, very few universities have been involved in creating programs for local police agencies. He said other police departments could benefit from similar collaborations, but since every jurisdiction has unique problems and concerns, they should work with a university in the same area. He added that although about 13 percent of police departments nationwide currently have the technology, the number has grown in the last three or four years.

Darnell said that she and Crime Analyst Elaine Posey recognized the need for visual representation of crime statistics in 1996, and in 1998 a federal grant made crime mapping possible. Around the same time, Schneider offered the help of a graduate student who wanted to work on a crime mapping project for local law enforcement.

“Basically, we supplied the bucks and the historical data … and UF supplied the brains,” Darnell said. “We receive high-quality, state-of-the-art assistance for a relatively low cost … with minimal impact or disruption to our normal course of business.”