Mapping crime

Spiking crime rates have encouraged police forces to draw on technology to anticipate trouble spots

A decade ago, Bogota had a bad name. Violent crime was out of control. Rather than simply buying more guns or patrol cars, Bogota8217;s cops went for something bigger: science. The city began superimposing millions of police bulletins onto digitised city maps to pinpoint which bandits were at work and where. By displaying crime data on easy-to-read city maps, police were able to target urban hot spots and optimise street patrols. Murders have since fallen by a third in the past five years and the police8217;s approval rating has soared. 8220;Crime mapping has made us faster and more efficient,8221; says Gen. Luiz Alberto Gomez, head of Bogota Metropolitan Police. 8220;We are serving the neighbourhoods better.8221;

So are police in several countries, as the virtues of hi-tech crimefighting become clear. Spiking crime rates everywhere from Colombia to Brazil, India to South Africa, have encouraged more and more cops to draw on technology to anticipate where criminals are going to strike next, so their thinly stretched forces can be at the right place at the right time. 8220;Without computerised crime analysis,8221; says Alexandre Peres, a government security strategist in Pernambuco, Brazil, 8220;policing is guesswork.8221;

The trend goes back to the early 1990s, when New York City police started using CompStat, a computer-driven mapping tool. In the next decade or so, violent crimes tumbled by 70 percent; the city now ranks 222nd in the country in crime. Major cities across the US and Europe followed New York8217;s lead, and now the rest of the world is catching on. Colombia began arming police with printouts of satellite maps annotated with crime data to show neighborhood trouble spots. In half a decade homicide rates plummeted in Bogota by 30 percent, Medellin 35 percent and Cali 25 percent. Sao Paulo tripled its budget in security technology and has seen its murder rate fall by half since 1999, when the Infocrim crime-monitoring system was installed. India and South Africa have started similar programmess.

Cheaper technology is a big reason for the boom in crime mapping. Tools range from 50,000 I2 8220;kernel density8221; software, which can sniff out elaborate financial transactions, to 1,600 mapping programmes, to Google Earth. Rather than sticking coloured tacks on paper maps, crime strategists stick virtual pushpins into computerised street maps, flagging each zone with essential data gleaned from criminal archives, demographic data and even social indicators like poverty and urban blight. If police blotters show a recent surge in muggings in an outlying Sao Paulo neighborhood, crime analysts can cross-check the district for aggravating factors like drug trafficking, loitering street kids or boarded-up buildings, and throw all this data onto street maps to orient patrol cars. In this way, crime mapping weds the geographer and the police analyst, allowing law enforcers to understand how crime emerges, morphs and migrates. 8220;Mapping changed everything,8221; says Tulio Khan, planning coordinator for Sao Paulo8217;s Public-Safety Department. 8220;Police began to see patterns that explain urban hot spots.8221;

Three years ago, South African geographers and computer scientists helped the authorities catch and convict three separate gangs of murderers and kidnappers in Durban and Cape Town by tracing their cellphone signals and plotting their movements on digital street maps, felony by felony. Since then, South Africa8217;s main police force, SAPS, has used crime mapping to fight armed robbery and serial criminals, while its FBI-like Scorpion elite investigative unit concentrates on catching high-priority felons.

In many cities, police departments are fond of saying that 8220;police are not omnipresent.8221; But neither is crime. Belo Horizonte, a regional Brazilian capital, is home to 110 shantytowns8212;each believed to be deadly. Yet crime analysts found that only six accounted for the majority of homicides. Metropolitan police reassigned their patrols to the danger zones, and violent crime plunged.

All the intelligence in the world won8217;t help if police fail to act promptly. When burglars hit Jitesh Shah8217;s jewellery shop in Mumbai, he managed to sneak out of the store and dial 100. Yet by the time the operator jotted down Shah8217;s location and passed the note to the radio dispatcher, who called for a patrol car, the thieves were long gone. Failures like that convinced the Mumbai police to invest 1.35 million in India8217;s first crime-mapping operation, begun in January. The control room will soon be able to pinpoint exact crime locations and relay them to roaming, GPS-guided response vans.

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Crime scholars caution that no one knows why some crimes fall while others spike. Community policing, curfews for bars and bright street lights are still indispensable. Yet even the most hidebound cop knows that the old ways aren8217;t enough. Bandits won8217;t surrender at the click of a mouse, but the science of crimefighting is helping keep them on the run.

MAC MARGOLIS

The Mile Hogger

The JCB Dieselmax car was shown at the British mechanical digger JCB8217;s headquarters at Rocester in England on April 20.The car has been designed to break the land speed record for diesel-powered vehicles. Engineers at the company have been working in secret on the JCB Dieselmax, which is capable of travelling at more than 482.8 kmph. The yellow and black car is 9 m long and contains two modified versions of a standard JCB engine. The car is 160 kmph faster than a Formula One racing car, and will be put through its paces on Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah in August in a bid to break the current 379.412 kmph diesel-powered land speed record, set on August 25, 1973, by Virgil W Snyder and the Thermo King Streamliner. 8212;AP