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Las Vegas, Nevada, has recently experienced a drop in crime, like much of the rest of the country. Some areas around the country attribute the drop in crime to the current state of the economy and others take credit for innovative crime-fighting initiates. But according to a recent story out of Las Vegas, the local police are crediting their drop in crime to the use of new technology, including crime mapping, and changes in their philosophy toward policing.
Has your agency thought about public-facing crime mapping? Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
The United Nations recently released an anti-human trafficking manual for use in law enforcement agencies all over the world. The description is as follows:
“The Anti-Human Trafficking Manual for Criminal Justice Practitioners is the result of a global cooperative process in which expert representatives from academia, NGOs, international organizations, law enforcement officers, prosecutors and judges from all over the world contributed their expertise and experiences. . . . The purpose of the Anti-Human Trafficking Manual for Criminal Justice Practitioners is to support criminal justice practitioners in the prevention of human trafficking, the protection of its victims, the prosecution of its culprits and in the international cooperation needed to achieve these goals.”
Go to the website to download individual chapters or the entire manual by clicking here.
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Law enforcement officers in Idaho are using a new tool in their fight against drunk driving: a syringe. A select number of law enforcement officers have received phlebotomy training (drawing blood) so that they can test for blood alcohol level the field.
Why not just use Breathalyzers? For many years now, defense attorneys in Idaho have been counseling all clients to refuse Breathalyzer tests, which is the legal right of their clients. However, the US Supreme Court ruled in a 1966 case that police have the right to forcibly administer a blood test on a suspect when officers have reasonable suspicion that a suspect is under the influence of alcohol. So to keep Idaho roads safe from drunk drivers, police are being trained to take blood and get drunk drivers off the street.
Get on the map at CrimeReports.com
I received an email this morning from a reader who, contrary to previous articles posted here at The Crime Map, expressed that surveillance cameras DO, in fact, prevent crime. He added that cameras prevent crime by putting criminals behind bars, preventing them from re-offending.
Surveillance
Although it is certainly true that surveillance cameras, or CCTV, have helped catch criminals in the past (keeping them off the street), many citizens and lawmakers questions the overall effectiveness of a surveillance camera system. For example, a recent story published by the BBC stated that for every 1,000 cameras in London, only one criminal was caught with the technology last year. However, with over 1 million cameras, that still adds up to 1,000 criminals caught with the aid of CCTV. But, are 1,000 criminals worth the 500 million pounds spent on maintaining the cameras every year? The number spent on maintaining the system equates out to 500,000 British pounds per criminal caught last year, which converts to over $833,000 per criminal in US dollars.
In America, a system that spent $833,000 to catch one criminal would be deemed a huge waste of taxpayer money. Despite the fact that a significant amount of criminals are caught by surveillance cameras, the amount of resources it takes to install and maintain the technology far outweighs the comparatively small return.
Communication
But there might be better ways to put our tax dollars to work. Although the invention of cameras have allowed police to watch more of our neighborhoods from afar, and patrol cars have given police the ability to move faster and cover larger areas, police are less and less inclined to actually build relationships with members of the community. Lawrence Sherman, quoted in Peter Moskos’ book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District, says “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”
It is the shift from active policing to passively waiting that has, perhaps, most damaged citizen’s relationship with law enforcement. It has put officers at arms length, out of sight, and out of mind. As a result, citizens see law enforcement as the specter that approaches when bad things happen (or the Big Brother who is watching them through a surveillance camera), not the partner that they interact with to prevent crime in their community. To prevent this Us vs. Them relationship between citizens and law enforcement, a communication shift needs to take place.
Already that shift is taking place through the rise of law enforcement agencies embracing social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and CrimeReports. Although a neighborhood police officer may not be walking your street, they are slowly becoming more accessible online. These new communication tools give average citizens better access to crime data, information, and two-way communication, but they do not fully replace the advantages of foot patrol officers.
The Future Technology-Assisted, Community-based Law Enforcement Efforts
Just a few days ago, the Baltimore Police Department announced it would be issuing BlackBerries to all of its officers in the coming months, virtually making patrol-car-laptops obsolete overnight. With this new technology, officers have less reason to stay close to their patrol cars and have more freedom to move around on foot easier. Perhaps technology has brought us the next shift in law enforcement: a return to widespread neighborhood foot patrol officers, who leverage personal relationships in the community and online communication tools to prevent crime in their community.
Instead of reinforcing an Us vs. Them mentality through increased surveillance, maybe we should put more actual (instead of virtual) eyes in our neighborhoods to build relationships and foster community empowerment and responsibility through community-based relationships between citizens and law enforcement.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Recently, in Atlanta, a couple posted a surveillance video on YouTube of three men burglarizing their home. Soon after, the three men were caught. It’s just one of the ways that social media is helping to decrease crime.
Social Media Increases Communication
The rise of web 2.0 and social media has enabled everyone to communicate faster and easier than ever before in the history of the planet. And these new communication tools are useful for more than just telling all your Facebook friends that you’re having spaghetti for dinner, they are having an impact on real-world situations, including crime.
Communication Decreases Crime
As little as 10 years ago, communicating with your local police department was a difficult, time-consuming process. Sure, citizens could read about crime in the weekly police blotter in the newspaper, or maybe hear about a handful of high-profile crimes on the local news, but to find out about crime in one’s own neighborhood required slogging down to the station, filling out paper work, and waiting. Likewise, police could do little to inform the public about crime in their area, save going door-to-door to tell everyone in the neighborhood what was going on.
Today, police and citizens have virtual two-way communication through web 2.0 technology like CrimeReports, Twitter, Facebook, or even text messaging. And as the avenues of communication increase, crime decreases. Eric Baumer, a criminologist at Florida State University in Tallahassee said, “It’s interesting in the sense that [crime has gone down] while the ability of citizens to surveil and connect to police” has gone up.
Citizens Want to Connect
When citizens have the ability to communicate and connect with their local law enforcement, they use it. If going down to the station to request crime reports was too time consuming in the past, now citizens can simply go to CrimeReports and see crime with a few clicks of a mouse or follow their local PD on Twitter.
With ease of communication comes more widespread adoption. Now that communication with law enforcement has become easier through web 2.0 tools, more people are tuning in, following, friending, and engaging in the conversation. And when more people are getting the information they need to keep themselves safe, more people are using that knowledge to protect themselves and prevent crime.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
A study done by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice, published at the end of 2007, found that half of all respondents, regardless of race, said drugs, alcohol, and poverty were the most to blame for crime in the US; however, only about 30% of respondents felt that addressing these issues directly—through drug treatment and job training/placement programs—was the answer to reducing crime. The majority of respondents felt that the best way to fight crime was through increased police presence and stricter sentencing guidelines for criminals.
Although most law enforcement agencies have discovered that working directly with the residents of a neighborhood to address the root causes, decreases crime, it seems that a majority of citizens still feel that the best way to stop crime is to put more criminals into the justice system and keep them in jails.
The Results of Exile
A lock-em-up approach like this seem similar to the traditional attitude toward sex offenders that has recently sparked a debate about sex offender residency and registry laws brought to the surface by the arrest of Philip Garrido. Basically, our first reaction as citizens is to exile those who do us wrong. But woefully, in the case of Garrido, exile can make the situation worse.
I wonder if we can use the recent public backlash against decades of knee-jerk-reaction sex offender laws, as a warning of things to come. At one time, pushing sex offenders to the outskirts of society seemed like a good idea, until we found out that pushing sex offenders to the outskirts created a perfect opportunity for them to re-offend. Will locking up criminals and throwing away the key someday come back to haunt us as well?
As citizens of a nationwide community, is there a point at which we begin to stop pushing our problems away from us, roll up our sleeves, dig in, and solve the problems in our own neighborhoods?
Taking Responsibility
Solving problems in our own neighborhoods takes work and dedication. Solving the root causes of crime, rather than just dealing with the consequences, requires much more work up front. Creating drug treatment programs, job training, and better educational opportunities may, at first, seem like climbing Everest. But once you reach the peak of a mountain, the rest is downhill. Creating programs to fight the causes of crime now provides us with an easier route and less crime in the future.
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Image of a "precog," a psychic used to predict future crime, from the movie Minority Report.
And you thought Minority Report was just another Tom Cruise movie. Philadelphia is now experimenting with a computer system that attempts to predict the likelihood that a parolee will re-offend. Of course, Philadelphia’s system is a far cry from having three psychics locked in a dark basement predicting crimes. Their system relies on a complex computer system that reads an offender’s history, compares it with past parolee data, and predicts the likelihood that the parolee will commit another crime: high, medium, or low.
Currently, the system is not used to keep people in prison, but rather it identifies those who are at a high risk for re-offending, so those offenders can receive special services to help deter them from continuing their violent lifestyles.
Ethical Questions
The system seems altruistic enough for now, but it raises some ethical questions about “predicting” who will and will not commit crimes in the future based on an automated computerized process. Our current justice system is based on the idea that a man is innocent until proven guilty. If an automated computer system is used to label me as “high risk for re-offending,” is that not, in essence, labeling me guilty until proven innocent?
This is not to say that offering special services to those at high risk is a bad idea. In fact, identifying those persons who, historically, have a high risk of returning to their criminal lifestyle and offering them special service is probably a good idea. But if those special services are effective at reducing recidivism, then why not offer them to all parolees?
What “Might” Happen
However, regardless of the effectiveness of the programs that are offered as a result of parolee re-offense risk assessment, a system that automatically predicts a future life of crime for parolees can be a dangerous thing and needs to be handled ethically and with oversight in order for it not to negatively affect the parolee or society at large based on what “might” happen.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Leave a comment and tell me what you think.
Get on the map at CrimeReports.com
The Baltimore PD will soon issue BlackBerries to virtually all of its officers. The BlackBerries, referred to as “pocket cops,” will allow officers to download real-time information, suspect photos, criminal histories, and more, much quicker and easier than with the laptops in their police cruisers.
In a pilot program, the BlackBerries have already helped officers bring in more criminals. And officials envision the day when laptops in cruisers will become obsolete.
Read more about the program here: http://www.officer.com/online/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=48237
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
A recent article posted at The Christian Science Monitor, reports that nearly a year after the massive anti-crime protests in Mexico, little has changed to curb crime or to improve relations between citizens and law enforcement. In fact, many residents feel that the crime has gotten worse.
Originally, as a result of the protests, the government promised to “root out corrupt police moonlighting for kidnapping rings, better coordinate police actions, and create more citizen watch groups.” And although the government says it has accomplished its goals, citizens still feel unsafe.
Overcoming a Culture of Not Reporting Crime
The real problem, pointed out by one citizen, is not police corruption itself, but rather Mexico’s culture of not reporting crime. Many citizens do not report crime out of fear of retaliation from criminals, or fear that the police that they report to are corrupt and won’t pay attention anyway. The article points out that as much as 80% of crime goes unreported.
What exists, then, is a massive lack of trust between citizens and law enforcement. This mistrust leads to a culture of fear toward law enforcement. Just like any neighborhood in the United States, if citizens fear the police, they will not work with them to reduce crime—or even report it. The problem of mistrust, then, is the root of the problem.
Quelling Fear Through Anonymity and Technology
Fear and mistrust are bred from secrecy. One of the ways that Mexico can encourage citizens to trust police is to open up crime data to the public. Illuminemos (“Light Up Mexico”), an organization dedicated to reducing crime in Mexico, has reportedly published a crime map to combat the lack of information from police (although, I have not been able to find it). Nevertheless, public-facing crime mapping could prove a useful public relations tool for a government trying to instill its citizens with trust in law enforcement. Pushing actual crime data to a publicly available site not only gives citizens the information they need to track crime and protect themselves, but opening the data up to the public shows that the government trust the public with the information. If the government offers an olive branch, through public-facing crime mapping, they prove that they are not hiding anything and that they are actively seeking citizen participation in reducing crime.
In addition, some citizens do not report crime for fear of retaliation. CiviRep, a pioneering SMS crime reporting system has been deployed in Venezuela (read more about it here). The system allows citizens to use cell phones to anonymously report crime from any location. The crime info is sent to local police who can respond and map crime in real time. A similar system, deployed in Mexico, could help quell the fear of retaliation and increase crime reporting dramatically.
Deployment
Granted, there are some technological issues to overcome in deploying public crime mapping and text message crime reporting. For instance, because addresses in Mexico are not clearly defined or regulated, mapping by address could be a problem, forcing police to map crime by GPS coordinates. In addition, the money may not be available to build or maintain these systems. However, working toward these technological solutions to reduce crime and create openness could provide a positive return on investment for citizens and the Mexican government
UPDATE: The Illuminemos map can be found here: http://www.mapadelincuencial.org.mx/zonas_de_riesgo.php (Thanks to reader lewis shepherd for the tip)
Get on the crime map at CrimeReports.com
Gov Tech just published an interview with California’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Mark Weatherford, in which he elaborated on some of his plans for implementing IT security across the state. In regards to security concerns for government-based social networking, he said the following:
“We’re going to jump out in front of this and get something in place that allows state employees to use social networks. It’s going to be my job to figure out how we can safely and securely implement these technologies in state agencies because in a couple of years we’re not going to have this discussion anymore. This is going to happen. We just need to make sure we’re doing it properly.”
State governments are beginning to realize that social networking is not a fad, but represent a fundamental shift in the way that citizens communicate and interact with their government. Local government and law enforcement need to have a similar attitude: “This is going to happen. We just need to make sure we’re doing it properly.”
Using social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, or Web 2.0 tools like CrimeReports is the first step.
Source: http://www.govtech.com/gt/articles/717247?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=link
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