CHAPTER SIX: PLANNING NEEDS

Planning is essential in all management arenas and is no less so in the implementation of a geographic information systems function in the law enforcement agency of small to medium municipalities. Planning for GIS capability has several dimensions. It is an opportunity for community planning and increased interagency coordination. Overall, the effectiveness of GIS in local planning depends upon political support, staffing, systems sharing between agencies, and database cooperation. It is especially important to establish a pattern of investment in human capital to assure the development and retention of experienced GIS analysts, as was found in a survey of local governments in four Southeastern states by Budic (1994).

Among the policy implications of this chapter are these:

Local officials need to be given more information on the planning implications of GIS in law enforcement.

Formation of interagency coordinating bodies should be encouraged.

The close relation of GIS implementation to community planning suggests the need for closer cooperation of funding agencies which deal with these two areas of public policy.

Planning Principles

Plan effective data management

GIS software purchase needs to be part of a broader planning process which forces managers to look beyond immediate situations and look at data integration needs. From the Lenexa, KS, interview:

"I'll use the agency I work for now as a prime example. They didn't have anybody in the Crime Analysis position when they bought a new records management software and that software has no open query or ad hoc query capabilities whatsoever. So when they decided they wanted to do crime mapping, they bought the software and gave no thought whatsoever as to where the data was going to come from or how to get the data."

Without a planning-oriented organizational culture, efforts to implement crime mapping are likely to fail. Creating a planning-oriented climate is ordinarily the product of strong leadership belief in the practical importance of planning. GIS is all about data integration in police departments and even across municipal agencies, and integration requires planning. Data management involves planning not only for the collection but also for the maintenance of crime data. As Sergeant Ron Rasmussen of the Seattle Police Department points out, jurisdictions which can inherit their baseline maps from a planning or tax department have a leg up on implementation:

"It takes a tremendous amount of time to build your street layers, the things you're going to geocode off of. Maintaining those things is very cost-intensive and if you don't have to bear that cost, you're providing a greater service to the community and a lot better scale of economy for your GIS system."

Local officials need more information on the planning implications of GIS in law enforcement

More effort needs to be undertaken to inform mayors, city managers and other city officials of the importance of planning when instituting new crime mapping capabilities. Furthermore, they must appreciate its community planning dimension in a law enforcement agency. Funding agencies also must recognize how planning grants need to precede implementation grants for effective development of crime mapping capabilities in small to medium jurisdictions. Local officials also benefit if funding agencies are pro-active in their outreach. GIS coordinators in small to medium jurisdictions need to be contacted through multiple media, including websites, e-mail, conventional mailings, and conferences. City of Wilson GIS coordinator Mark Wells made this comment:

"If there's funding being made available ... have multiple means of marketing that information so that it'll smack me in the face, so I can find it really easy…"

Over and over respondents in this study emphasize that obtaining good data is the first step in undertaking crime mapping. Establishing a sound database system must precede implementation of crime mapping. Dimensions of the database management phase include:

Data standards. Establish standards for data collection covering data fields, data dictionaries, and data format. This may involve inter-agency cooperation (as illustrated by Winston-Salem's GIS users' group meetings and its technical advisor group, revolving around cooperation of the assessor's office and the police department) or even cross-jurisdictional cooperation.

Data warehousing. Draw data from multiple sources into a data warehouse for purposes of crime mapping.

Data filtering. Clean and geocode data (matching the baseline address database with addresses in police incident reports, parole and probation release information, and other law enforcement data).

Development of a database management plan is central to the planning phase of crime mapping implementation. Database management concerns become an ongoing focus of activities associated with crime mapping functions.

Mobilize existing information resources

The initiation of crime mapping capability requires and also provides the opportunity to consider what information resources already exist in relation to the priorities which local communities may set. John Couchell, assistant director of the Crime Analysis Unit in Charlotte, NC, gave this advice to smaller communities about first steps toward crime mapping implementation:

"When we go and talk to different agencies what we try to recommend is, first of all, that they get a commitment that this is what they want to do. Then from there, try not to re-create the wheel -- there are other agencies out there, whether it's the Planning Department or Tax Department or Transportation Department that have a lot of the data services that you want. And that's what we're trying to push -- you don't have to reinvent everything."

Likewise, our respondent from Lenexa, KS emphasized that this advice applies to small communities as well:

" The first thing I would have [a department planning crime mapping] do is contact other city or county agencies to see if any of them already have base maps, and if so, are they willing to share, and what software they're using. I'd recommend that first and foremost, hands down."

Though not always recognized as such, planning is the first need for communities which are considering instituting a crime mapping capability. Planning involves these action steps:

Agree on a mission statement for crime mapping

A mission statement should develop a clear, focused vision reflecting the collaboration of crime analysis staff, law enforcement leadership, and key municipal officials regarding goals of the GIS project. A mission statement sets forth a vision -- an image of what the project can and should become. It also defines who the project is to serve.

Identify milestones to be reached

Milestones are target goals and interim objectives which are more specific and concrete, based on the mission statement, and used to focus change and improvement efforts within the project, and to assess progress.

Survey existing information resources in relation to goals and objectives

An information audit of existing law enforcement, municipal, and regional data resources can determine the extent to which the GIS project may take advantage of what has gone before.

Create a suitable organizational culture

Organizational culture is a climate which grows out of collaboration and empowerment as within-agency teamwork and partnerships with outside agencies serve to create shared values in support of project goals. Creating a supporting organizational culture is a key leadership role which has much to do with how project members spend their time, what problems they solve, and how resources are distributed.

The organizational culture factor is paramount. The organization must recognize the importance of planning and recognize that planning is an ongoing process which must evolve as community needs and information technology itself both change, and which therefore requires ongoing management support.

Increase interagency coordination

At a relatively early point in the development of a law enforcement GIS capability, it becomes desirable to integrate crime data with data from other public agencies. Without careful planning from the inception of the GIS effort it is entirely possible that the police department data system will be incompatible with that of the public works department, social welfare agencies, the department of revenue and others. A reasonable early effort to determine data and software compatibility at the outset may prevent costly and frustrating data conversion efforts later which would diminish the efficiency and effectiveness of GIS operations. In fact, the Winston-Salem, NC, interview suggested that making a commitment to software and data compatibility across departments was one of the first steps in establishing crime mapping:

"[It is] really important to invest in software that would be compatible with other agencies' in the area. So that would be my first recommendation - to have some collaboration with other departments, and to be sure that you're basically on the same page, for your future efforts."

A similar story was told in the Cary, NC, interview, where initial training in ArcView was of limited benefit because as the Cary Police Department found it necessary to maintain compatibility with the city's GIS office, which was a MapInfo shop.

The implementation of GIS in a law enforcement agency provides an opportunity to raise issues of inter-agency standardization. This is illustrated in the Osceola, FL, interview: ⁽¹⁾

"Well, first of all, as in my jurisdiction here, the county has MapInfo software, and the city, within the county, has ArcView software ... I personally would suggest, that to be similar across the board with your programming, especially with agencies that you're going to be working so closely with. I believe that data, and maps, and even just expertise could be shared more readily between agencies."

Forming an interagency and perhaps even interjurisdictional coordinating group to mutually inform and perhaps standardize software and data standards for purposes of information exchange can be an important step toward increasing the efficiency of the crime mapping function. Moreover, it is a step which may be easier in small to medium jurisdictions (the same Los Angeles respondent observed, "If somebody as huge as the bureaucracy like the County of Los Angeles can do it, then probably anybody can.").

Form interagency coordinating groups

Interagency coordinating groups should be formed for purposes of mutual information sharing and possibly recommending standards for GIS software and data formats. This decreases the costs of information sharing among cooperating agencies. In the process of interviewing the top crime analysis centers in the country, the need for interagency coordination was a recurring suggestion. Larger areas like Los Angeles and Baltimore have formal bodies that help facilitate coordination among agencies. Al Hyder, the director of services, for the Asheville Police Department makes an excellent case for interagency coordination by pointing out the advantages such an agency would have for its participants, especially if jurisdictions are considering a regional approach:

"I think it can work, if it's done correctly ... and some agencies are better prepared to advance with technology than others ... We had talked about some independent regional authority of some sort, that I think would help to facilitate the development of regional crime mapping."

Plan on a community-wide basis

Implementation of a geographic information system for law enforcement may well raise general community planning issues which go well beyond issues of crime. For example, consider this excerpt from the interview with the GIS officer for Gallatin, TN:

"And I'll tell you one other thing that's sort of becoming a key player in the discussion is that, probably for the past forty years we've been under a very specific zone function. We have three zones that are in the city, and, really, those zones aren't representative of the neighborhoods. We have many various neighborhoods within those zones, and so we're looking at the discussion of how we can integrate that, and if we need to, we probably will end up needing to do that before we actually get the crime mapping off the ground as to how we're going to re-designate those neighborhoods."

The issue of defining "neighborhood" for purposes of crime mapping is closely related to similar issues in zoning, school districting, public recreation, and other aspects of community planning. Various agencies will define "neighborhood" differently, but a common definition is needed for effective interagency information sharing necessary for crime mapping. While initial GIS implementation may be confined to demonstration projects within a given law enforcement agency, planning common definitions for eventual integration of GIS databases with community-wide information resources is to be encouraged.

Chapter summary

In GIS implementation, the essence of planning is determining which data to track and how the data are categorized. In this effort, interagency cooperative agreements for data-sharing can be an opportunity to improve information integration at the local level. While some communities may despair at problems associated with the interconnectedness of GIS in law enforcement with issues in other arenas, other communities may take this as an opportunity to improve community planning for the benefit of all. Formation of interagency coordinating groups has been effective in a variety of communities.

Crime mapping also has proven a valuable tool for involving the community in planning efforts, such as community policing outreach efforts. In addition to the use of maps at community meetings, online versions of crime mapping provide a ready way to present crime information to the community on an interactive, ongoing basis, as Lincoln, Nebraska, does using MapObjects software (see http://www.ci.lincoln.ne.us/city/police/crimemap.htm).

Notes

1. The respondent from the County of Los Angeles provided similar testimony:

"I've seen many, many agencies ... asking what's the best software to process their data. Do you want to go with MapInfo, or ArcView, or something, but in many cases the first question needs to be, 'What kind of data do they have that's available to them?' If their city planning is using one application and the data is not going to easily migrate to whatever the pet crime analysis tool is, it probably isn't going to do you any good ... the County of Los Angeles has a GIS advisory body which is a consortium of all the major GIS users, as far as agencies, county planning, voter registrar recorder, the public works, urban research, and the fire department - we all basically get together and try to come up with standards that we can all abide by so that we can share data."