The National Institute of Justice’s (NIJ) article, “From Crime Mapping to Crime Forecasting: The Evolution of Place-Based Policing,” highlights how advances in analytical capabilities have enabled the criminal justice community to combine crime, geographic, and social data to conduct statistical analyses, identify crime patterns, and forecast where crime is likely to occur.
The article provides a brief history of crime mapping, beginning in the mid-1800s with maps showing the relationship between educational level and violent and property crime in France, to the introduction of problem-oriented policing in the late 1970s, to the variety of intelligence-led policing approaches emerging in the 2000s. The article also describes how NIJ has played a critical role in the development of place-based policing strategies, from managing the Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety program (established as the Crime Mapping Research Center in 1997) to funding predictive policing models and geospatial policing approaches in jurisdictions across the United States. Additionally, as the criminal justice community continues to examine the use of technology to reduce crime, NIJ is supporting research that looks beyond administrative data to impacts, such as investigative outputs and prosecution outcomes, to develop a more holistic understanding of different policing strategies and their effects.
For more information and resources related to place- and person-based policing research, access the article.