CHAPTER TEN: STAGES OF GIS DEVELOPMENT

While there is more than one path to developing an effective crime mapping function in a small to medium jurisdiction, there are common steps which emerge from a survey of past experiences of similar towns and cities. The policy implication of this research finding suggests that communities newly aspiring to implement crime mapping need information on the predictable stages of development which they may anticipate and information on how other jurisdictions have responded to these stages.

PLANNING PHASE

Involving key leadership in crime mapping efforts

Involving upper management in crime mapping efforts is crucial to agency success in implementing GIS. Where GIS exists in a law enforcement agency, often it is because a member of top management saw its value and mandated its use. For instance, in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg jurisdiction, the analysts credit the previous chief of police, Chief Dennis Nowicki, with being the original champion for using GIS in crime analysis. As part of their response to the question, "How would you summarize the stages of development of your agency since that start year?" one of the analysts quickly responded,

"How would I summarize that?, I think that the way that it all came about is that the Chief of Police here at that time, Chief Dennis Nowicki, was the champion for GIS, and he found the resources to hire a GIS coordinator ... then he also decided to merge our Research and Planning Bureau with our Crime Analysis Bureau. Once that merger took place, then all of us could work with a centralized data source and make GIS products available to the department, and the very first thing that we did in terms of an analytical product is, again, was driven by the Chief of Police."

Likewise, Durham crime analyst Belinda Pridgen stated:

"The second thing I would do is to really inform management and educate management on what can be done with crime mapping. When we first started crime mapping, a couple of our executive command staff members knew about crime mapping, but they had very little information about it. We had the Wilson Police Department come in and do a little presentation of crime mapping, and again, because they didn't see the need or the usefulness of the project, only about three people showed up. So you have to sell your management staff on it ... "

A new head of law enforcement may bring a mandate for development of a GIS capability, based on his or her familiarity with other jurisdictions or trends in the profession. A head of crime analysis may come to the same vision and "sell" crime mapping to his or her chief. GIS staff may come back from regional or national conferences enthused by crime mapping techniques they have seen and use this new information to "sell" those higher in the organization. Regardless of the specific impetus, however, little is apt to happen in development of crime mapping until top management assumes an active leadership role. This is essential both externally (to "sell" crime mapping to city council members, for instance) and internally (to mobilize staff interest and align crime mapping efforts with the organization's incentive system).

Leadership and vision are the most important factors in crime mapping implementation. This is illustrated by an account from the Redlands, CA, interview:

"Our first development in our agency was a captain with a futuristic idea of what he wanted. He wrote a grant. He submitted it to the Office of Criminal Justice Planning, in the state of California. He was accepted with this grant. He was given the money. He hired personnel. He developed a partnership with ESRI, showing what the police department would like to do, and how ESRI could fit into that partnership, and what we could give each other. We worked with a top-down fashion, with the upper management brought into it first, and then crime mapping was brought down. We already had a standardized data set, so our integration was fairly easy, and then we went on to hire me ... but our main thing, was our captain with his futuristic ideas."

Leadership from the top is essential at the beginning of crime mapping implementation because people and even political skills are necessary to "sell" crime mapping to upper law enforcement management and to city councils. The Redlands, CA, interview also highlights this point:

"I believe first you have to have sales of the crime mapping. I mean people skills and political skills in the beginning ... [so that] police officers and other departmental personnel see the value and the importance of the crime mapping. But in the beginning, you're going to need the sales ... to be able to push the crime mapping forward through your city council and all that ... with the political portion you need the backing of your chief."

The involvement of key leadership, determined to implement GIS, sets the stage for corresponding action steps:

(1) Strategic planning (defining the mission of GIS in the jurisdiction)

(2) Organizational design (organizational location of the crime mapping function)

(3) Permanent funding (budgeting and cost recovery for crime mapping services).

Pre-implementation, during the planning phase, establishes the duties and responsibilities of the parties partnering in the GIS effort and specifies the initial job specifications of key personnel.

Identify problems to be addressed through crime mapping

An obvious first step in designing a crime mapping system is surveying existing information resources. Captain Homer Craig of the Winston-Salem Police Department advised:

"Start out small and work into it specifically for what one's agency has, but you need to find out what kind of problems you've got in your agency, such as auto break-ins or auto larcenies. You've got individual officers that have great information, and we very rarely share that information with each other because of shifts and changes ... through GIS mapping, you can do that. And they're going to find a wealth of information that they've never tapped into before. Take your time and walk through it, and really do true analysis and find out what's really going on, and then develop plans to address it. "

As crime analyst Belinda Pridgen of Durham, NC, noted, this is part of the needs assessment phase of planning:

"The first thing I would do is look at every possibility in software ... We have a lot of options, and I would do a needs assessment to find out what the department really wants to do, what they need, and come up with a plan ... I think that was key for us."

Likewise, Captain Beverly Council of the Durham Police Department emphasized the goal-setting thrust of needs assessment:

"The first thing they're going to need to do is to decide on what it is they're trying to do, what kind of goals they're trying to set as far as crime reduction. They've got to really look at what kind of calls for service that they're having, what are the needs in the community, and then start laying that information out and mapping where is this stuff beginning to happen?"

As Nesbary noted (Nesbary, 2000: 19):

"The amount of work going into a needs assessment should not be underestimated. Municipalities such as Denver, Boston, and Los Angeles County developed requests for proposals that were hundreds of pages in length."

While needs assessment in small to medium jurisdictions undoubtedly is less involved than in large cities, a serious needs assessment must consider needs both internal and external to the law enforcement agency. Hardware, software, personnel, budget, intra-governmental, and intergovernmental dimensions must be determined. In undertaking crime mapping, the law enforcement department is establishing a system, not just purchasing software.

Develop partnerships

One of the potentially most important activities during the planning phase is the formation of partnerships. Crime mapping is one area where "doing it alone" is a difficult prospect. When asked what the first thing jurisdictions new to GIS should do, a crime analyst from the Baltimore County Police Department said:

"Well, I think that the very first thing that they need to do is find out whether or not any other agencies within their jurisdiction are using a GIS, because it's really important that you try to stay within the same platform. So, for example, if other agencies, let's say Planning or Public Works, are using MapInfo, then you may want to seriously consider using MapInfo. Also, if any universities or colleges in the area, or community colleges, have a GIS, you can partner with them and that's very helpful in terms of implementation, or whether or not there's any state agency that, you know, provides that kind of assistance, like maybe a state Office of Planning, for example."

Others have developed partnerships with neighboring jurisdictions, GIS vendors, or federal agencies.

Conduct a needs analysis

Conducting a needs analysis is an important starting aspect of deploying GIS in any jurisdiction because it serves as a road map to guide a jurisdiction toward successful implementation. Deena Bowman-Jamieson, GIS coordinator for the San Diego Police Department gave this advice for the small to medium jurisdiction:

"The first step, in my opinion, is to develop a needs assessment, to begin to look at who your users are, what their requirements are, how they're going to interact with data, and identify sources of information, and if data's not available, what the costs will be to acquire it."

As part of the needs analysis, jurisdictions should take the opportunity to look at the implementation by other departments, she went to tell us:

"… identifying those departments and actually sitting down and discussing with those departments their implementation of GIS, the lessons learned as far as the specific application, that they have, whether they would be willing to release that to another agency for implementation in that particular agency's GIS, and whatever their successes or their cutbacks have been, because I think that could be a good measure of what might occur or what this department that's new to GIS could possibly expect…".

A needs analysis will help prevent situations where jurisdictions receive money for software and hardware but then do not use it to its full capability. Lieutenant Michael Wood of the Rochester Police Department shared his view of this subject:

"…I think that's a common theme nowadays, especially with the technological advancements we see, everywhere. I mean, it's the gee whiz type of philosophy, or a mentality, where, we want this right now, and we don't take enough time to sit down and really analyze things and go, you know, go step-by-step as to what we need to really accomplish a quality product."

Finally, the best advice for establishing a new technology is to establish some type of strategic plan that is open and flexible enough to allow for changes in the technology. Again, Deena Bowman-Jamieson shares her thoughts with us:

"And I think that's where departments get hurt is by, over a couple of years, well they go out and they buy one thing and then a couple years later, they buy something else, and they end up with a mishmash of systems that may not be, usually, integrated. So by having the strategic plan, it helps them organize themselves as far as where they want to go and how they want to get there."

Establish a leadership board

A leadership body is needed to develop policies and procedures, define areas of responsibility, resolve issues pertaining to data stewardship, and to address performance problems and provide accountability. The role of the leadership body is to strategically involve all major stakeholders affected by crime mapping and to lead in the development of consensus regarding information needs and analysis priorities related to GIS in law enforcement. Setting long term goals and intermediate milestones and holding managers accountable for progress are also roles of the leadership board.

The leadership board must include those who hold the purse strings. Developing a funding stream for the implementation, stabilization, and eventual expansion of GIS is essential from the outset. Without such strategic leadership, tactical decisions about hardware, software, staffing, and crime analysis will founder, opening the door to demoralization and atrophy of the initial crime mapping efforts. A corollary of the leadership role in financial planning for GIS is that the leadership board will wish to see performance measures for investments in crime mapping, to justify investments. This in turn means there must be clear, realistic, and measurable program goals and objectives. While actual program evaluation is a staff function, the leadership board must be involved from the start in understanding how evidence of program success will be collected and communicated.

START UP STAGE

Hire staff

Obtaining support for crime mapping is aided by having staff who have a well-deserved reputation for excellence and competence in geographic information systems and crime analysis. There is a need for staff who transcend technical orientations and who can address managerial as well as technical concerns in law enforcement. Staff should be professional in the sense of eagerness to measure their performance

against the practices of the best in the field. GIS staff must be competent to market to end-users and top management through visits, forums, newsletters, user support groups, seminars, executive briefings, tours, demonstrations, hotlines, surveys, and other outreach methods.

Acquire hardware and software

The computer system must work and be seen as a valued tool enabling managers to carry out their functions, deliver services, and respond quickly to new demands . The needed computer power and other technology must be available, appropriate to the task and accessible within the budget. One must have high quality data and trained staff for the application in question. Inadequate investment in hardware has been a common bottleneck and cause of GIS failures. Some degree of standardization characterizes successful projects. While no specific system can be endorsed as an a priori standard, at the present time ArcView has a commanding lead in crime mapping applications in small to medium jurisdictions.

Ed Orff , senior crime analyst for the Colorado Springs Police Department illustrated these simple principles when he was asked to give advice about acquiring GIS for small to medium jurisdictions as part of the questions in our survey:

"What I would tell them is, first get the training in the software, to have the software in hand so that when you get back, you're automatically using it. Also be able to have the proper hardware to go ahead and support it, as far as size, speed of the computers, because when we came back, we found out that our computers were not big enough to handle the software and the demands that it placed on memory, to be able to look at other things in the software packages that are overlays, that are a lot cheaper."

Form cooperative agreements

Successful implementation requires giving all key individuals and units a stake in the benefits of crime mapping. Often prospective stakeholders start from a negative predisposition toward change, so new GIS technology must be presented as bringing desired benefits. Each stakeholder must feel that the reward structure of the system being created encourages collecting and sharing of information even when such efforts are not intrinsically part of what would otherwise be done. Rewards to stakeholders may include better information for strategic decision-making, distribution of the costs of information, and recognition for playing a leadership role. For staff who are stakeholders, rewards may also include the possibility of upgrading job descriptions, providing better career development ladders, and increased training opportunities. Plans for technology change are more effectively implemented when communicated in an open, informative, and plausible manner. The key variable explaining acceptance of GIS plans, is participation of the stakeholders. In contrast, top-down efforts to implement GIS may lead to the perception by individual managers that the GIS unit is remote, inflexible, and autocratic.

OPERATIONAL STAGE

Commit to compatibility with the municipality's existing GIS functions

Compatibility with the municipality's existing GIS functions greatly facilitates implementation of crime mapping. Two of our North Carolina survey cities, Wilson and Asheville, capitalized on the experience of having a municipal GIS coordinator. The Asheville respondent noted:

"The first thing that I would suggest is to get a GIS coordinator - someone who's experienced in GIS itself, not so much crime mapping, because if you don't, there are a lot of mistakes to correct. Your learning curve is much more difficult ... In our case we already had data and projects built that did not use the most economical GIS functions that we could. Our GIS coordinator has come in the past year and shown us many, many things that would have saved us hours and hours of time, that we had to figure out on our own. That's the biggest thing if you can convince your city just to get a GIS coordinator and start from there, instead of starting with the software, because that's kind of putting the cart before the horse."

Train staff

Managers must commit to a substantial investment training employees. Conversely, lack of investment in training and support personnel is an important cause of failure in GIS implementation. Reliance on end-user mutual support alone is a recipe for failure. Training should avoid technical jargon which may create a "semantic gap" between implementers and the organizational rank and file. Training the crime mapping staff may take on several forms, reflecting the variety of required skills. A successful unit seems to blend knowledge of crime analysis with knowledge of GIS. As an interviewee from Charlotte-Mecklenburg said:

"You've got two different disciplines here ... you've got a geography discipline that can be very technical, and then you've got law enforcement, criminal justice."

Crime mapping staff may be recruited from various sources, but many are recruited from within. Our interviews showed a diversity of backgrounds for crime mapping staff, ranging from sworn officers to civilians working for the police departments. Likewise, there are many options for training crime analysts in GIS: in-house, self-directed, commercial vendor, and university or community college training. No one source of training stands out. However, a commonly cited training source was the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), the creators of the software ArcView. Other resources included the Carolina Institute for Community Policing and the National Institute of Justice Crime Mapping Research Center. A more extensive list is found in Appendix C of this publication.

Implement pin mapping

It is important to begin the crime mapping effort with feasible projects which carry a high likelihood of utility within the jurisdiction. It is not accidental that pin mapping of crime incidents is almost invariably the initial function implemented by new crime analysis operations. Pin mapping provides a spatial overview of the distribution of crime and, particularly when provided at periodic intervals over time, shows crime patterns. Pin maps are simple to understand and have proved popular and effective with law enforcement leadership, beat officers, community liaison groups, and even juries. Early successes with pin mapping build demand for more sophisticated crime mapping functions which can be added later as the crime mapping function matures. As Lieutenant J. M. Bjurstrom of the Durham Police Department noted:

"[Electronic pin maps are] just something that reminds me of the old manual pin maps we used to do, but it's much more effective, and it's much more detailed, and a lot easier to keep up with."

Bjurstrom's supervisor, Captain Beverly Council, echoed similar thoughts:

"If you've got the information, you know the types of crimes are coming in, it's logical if you plot it with the pin map. All you're doing is making it more technologically easy, accessible. Pin maps do the same thing, so, as long as you can point it out, as to where the activities are going, you know what your agency needs to do."

STABILIZATION STAGE

Integrate incident reporting with other databases to produce overlays

Integrating data from other agencies is a crime mapping function faced early in the implementation process. Some examples are using Department of Corrections release data, warrants and summonses data, data on property ownership from tax databases, demographic information from the Census, streetlight information from public works, zoning information from the planning department, and alcohol sales information. Most of the responses to our question about data integration reveal that many analysts took the initiative to coordinate with other city departments.

Train both management and end users

In several places in this manual we have pointed out the necessity for training staff both in technical issues and in crime analysis aspects of GIS. However, it is equally important that end-users, both top management and patrol officers, learn to incorporate the new technology into their work. As one police supervisor stated:

"I would say that there's a lack of understanding of the purpose of our crime mapping, throughout the organization, and especially so, I think, by the people that need it most, you know, the tactical, first-line supervisors. It's somewhat viewed with suspicion. I think that there's a fear of accountability that comes with this technology. You know, we can actually point to a problem and say, go deal with it, and come back later and point to it again and see if there was any impact, and there's been some resistance to that. And this kind of falls into what I was just saying, that there must be clear expectations of operational response or tactical response to the crime information."

Involving first-line supervisors and higher officers in the planning process from the beginning can go a long way toward laying the crucial foundation for acceptance and buy-in for new technical tools based on GIS. Correspondingly, if end-users are involved in the creation of mapping reports and tools which will help them, faster utilization of the crime mapping products will ensue. An interviewee in Charlotte had this to say about staffing for GIS and for educating top management and front-line officers:

"One of the things that we've found is that GIS requires constant marketing to our superiors, to officers in the department ... So really, you might be better off hiring someone that has good basic computer knowledge, and an extremely good grasp of the business needs of the department: good at relationships, communication, and then, bring them up to speed on the GIS side. [It is not a good idea to ] bring in someone that has all the technical GIS skills you could ever ask for but doesn't understand how to create that product that an officer in the street can use, or chief of police can use. "

EXPANSION STAGE

Making needs assessment ongoing

A one-time needs analysis is insufficient since GIS is a changing technology . Ed Orff of the Colorado Springs Police Department pointed out that GIS products quickly become popular and customers began to ask for more products, making some reevaluation necessary:

"Also, I'd say that you have to have a department that's willing to go ahead and put money into it, to keep it ongoing, because once you start, you're going to get tagged with a lot of projects, because everybody starts to use it… It becomes very popular, very fast, to the point where you can't keep up."

Flexibility is a very important part of a strategic plan. Dan Helms of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department related a situation that one of the top ten cities in crime mapping in the U.S., Tempe, AZ, finds itself in:

"They have been unable to get any other kinds of data, and one of the problems in their area, is they're a MapInfo shop surrounded by ESRI government agencies in other jurisdictions. So while everybody else in central Arizona is trading sheet files and trading ArcInfo coverages, Tempe has been pretty much left out in the cold. They got into it before anyone else did, but they didn't play along with everyone else in their area, and now they're left out in the cold."

As part of the on going needs assessment, each jurisdiction should survey either its city or county GIS shops and determine if they should be compatible with these other agencies. Over and over again in our study we found that police agencies can get a tremendous "jump start" by availing themselves to data that already exists versus reinventing the wheel. Regarding the creation of data Mr. Helms went on to say,

"That's a function that's so large that it really can't be a police function; that's support that has to be given to other government agencies, private agencies, who, in turn, can use it to support police GIS."

Most city and county planning agencies are constantly updating their databases making them a rich source of background information.

Developing expanded resources

Obtaining strong, top management support for expanded resources before and during implementation is the most commonly-cited GIS success factor. Projects need a high-level "champion" who appreciates what technology can do and makes the case to the rest of top management. It helps if the GIS unit is highly placed within the law enforcement organization and if GIS responsibilities are under a single unit rather than split among many. Obtaining the support of key political actors, not limited to the law enforcement agency, is also important. At the same time, GIS implementers must try to maintain a neutral stance in organizational politics. The use of neutral third-party consultants to help ease politically difficult decisions is sometimes advisable. The manager should allow a flexible process and seek consensus one step at a time while avoiding the all-or-nothing plan approval strategy.

Developing broader networks

Lack of communication with end users of crime mapping is an important cause of system failure, exceeded only by failure to have a plan with appropriate scope. All affected departments must be kept informed through regularly scheduled formal reports, open meetings, user support groups and more broadly, the encouragement of a supportive organizational culture. Such an information culture cannot be created overnight, but is associated with how staff approaches problems, knows the GIS options and its costs and benefits, and the quality of interaction between users and GIS implementers.

Chapter summary

The planning phase of GIS implementation requires involving key law enforcement leadership in crime mapping efforts, identifying the problems to be addressed, developing partnerships with cooperating agencies, conducting a needs analysis, and establishing a leadership board. The start-up stage involves hiring staff, acquiring hardware and software, and coming to cooperative agreements. The operational stage involves committing to compatibility with one's municipal GIS infrastructure, training staff, and implementing basic functions such as pin mapping. The stabilization stage involves integrating incident reporting with other agency databases to produce overlays, training management and end users as well as staff. The expansion stage involves making needs assessment ongoing, developing an expanded resource base, and developing broader support networks.