NCJ Number
190421
Journal
Crime Mapping News Volume: 3 Issue: 2 Dated: Spring 2001 Pages: 4-6
Date Published
2001
Length
3 pages
Annotation
This article describes a new software package, called "School COP" (School Crime Operations Package), which is available to improve school incident data collection and analysis.
Abstract
School COP is intended for use by school security staff, school administrative staff, and other persons responsible for ensuring the safety of students and staff at elementary and secondary schools. School COP is essentially a scaled-down police records management system that has been tailored for schools. The database includes data related to the incident (e.g., date, time, type, location) and to persons involved in the incident (e.g., name, grade, action taken). Schools can pre-enter choices for many data elements, which speeds data entry and improves data quality, and can define categories of incidents or persons they especially want to track, such as hate crimes or gang-related incidents. The software balances ease-of-use and functionality by offering a variety of techniques for analyzing school incidents, including tabular reports, bar graphs, pie charts, and maps. Users will generally conduct analyses in one of three ways. The easiest method is to run one of the many "canned" reports and graphs. A second method is to use a single "build-a-map" screen to create a multi-layer graduated symbol map; and a third method, the most useful analysis, is first to search for a subset of incidents. Users can search on any single field or combination of fields. Incidents that meet the search criteria can be browsed, printed in tabular form, graphed, or mapped. School COP can do mapping by reading and displaying scanned images or shapefiles. Once the maps are available, users create a geographic description of their schools in the database. Each school is divided into one or more areas, with a specific map associated with each area. To date, approximately 1,110 jurisdictions have received the software. 2 figures and 4 references