Prospective crime mapping in operational context Final report

the busy schedule of the new Divisional Commander, the research team was unable to meet with andbrief him on the project until the end of October, nearly two and a half months into the pilot.Furthermore, key members of the Command Team had arranged annual leave and were unavailableduring the early days of the project period. During the first meeting that could be arranged post-August, it was revealed that instead of using the predictive capability of the maps, when the mapswere used, attention was instead focused on the locations of burglaries that had occurred within thelast two weeks, the approach that had previously been used on the Division (and the approach thatPromap outperformed and was designed to replace). The reason for this was that it was felt that theareas identified as being at risk were too large. Consequently, the software was further refined togenerate predictions for smaller areas.As a result of these factors, summarised in Figure 5.3, it took a few months for the system to be finetunedand for the Command Team members to unite to give Promap a high profile across the Division.Because the pilot was only seven months in duration and almost three months had elapsed before themaps were being produced in the way intended, it was not implemented over a sufficient period to fulfilits potential. As will become apparent, the pilot expired just when it was becoming accepted andunderstood across the Division.User-friendliness and impact on workloadGenerally, the Intelligence Analysts found the maps easy to produce, however, they voiced the opinionseveral times throughout the pilot that having the system on the Divisional network could havesignificantly improved the ease of producing the maps. More automation of the process would havealso reduced the time and effort involved. For example, the analysts regularly spent time manuallyremoving distraction burglaries from the dataset (as they felt that these burglaries would conform todifferent patterns and trends than other residential burglaries, although this is an empirical questionworth addressing). Only approximately 80 per cent of the data were automatically geo-coded by theforce IT system, and hence the analysts had to spend time manually geo-coding the remainder. Ofcourse, these issues are germane to the force IT system rather than the Promap software. However,they are worth noting as it is likely that similar issues may arise in other police force areas.Despite these issues, the analysts did not feel that the maps impacted greatly on their day-to-daywork. In some cases, where they were specifically responsible for summarising a burglary problem(e.g. producing a problem profile or a specific tasking document), they reported that the system helpedto illustrate patterns and trends they felt would not otherwise have been considered. The onlysignificant effect that the production of the maps had on the Intelligence Analysts was their startingtime at work. Because the maps had to be available to discuss in the daily briefing meeting at9:15a.m., the analysts had to ensure they were at work by 8a.m. By the end of the pilot, each analystwas only producing the maps once a week, and so the time involved was not a considerableinconvenience.50