NCJ Number
190308
Journal
Crime Mapping News Volume: 2 Issue: 3 Dated: Summer 2000 Pages: 1-4
Date Published
2000
Length
4 pages
Annotation
This paper describes Massachusetts' regional crime fighting system called SCAMP (Statewide Crime Analysis and Mapping Program), which enables local police agencies to not only analyze crime within their own jurisdictions, but also examine patterns of crime in the surrounding areas.
Abstract
SCAMP takes local crime data submitted to the State Police, adds some value to it, and then makes it available to local police agencies in an easily accessible format. SCAMP has been developed in such a way as to overcome some of the technical and political impediments to data sharing among agencies. SCAMP has overcome the potential difficulty of data sharing by using a standard data transport mechanism: the FBI's National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The NIBRS data set contains detailed incident-level data on a wide variety of offense categories, with data on victims, offenders, and arrestees, as well as property and drug data. What NIBRS lacks, however, is the street address of the crime, a critical missing link in turning a statistical data collection system into an operational policing tool. The Massachusetts Crime Reporting Unit modified NIBRS to include separate fields for street number, street name, additional address information, town name, and latitude and longitude. By creating a regional database and by demonstrating the utility of such a system, many of the political impediments to information sharing, such as personality conflicts, may be eliminated. The project, which is in an early stage of development, calls for an Internet application that has tight security, making it accessible only to police agencies. It will be built by using ESRI components such as Map Objects and Internet Map Server. The website will categorize crimes, provide tools for "rolling up" incident data into summary statistics by geographical area, facilitate mapping/reporting, create maps, create products for internal police department use and for external use, provide color maps directly printable from the Web browser, and present statistical summaries printable from the Web browser. Currently, the system is receiving addressable NIBRS data from 160 cities, towns, and campus police agencies throughout the State. 3 references and 1 figure