Mapping has a long history as a tool to understand crime. It is generally traced back to 19th century France, when cartographers first analyzed national patterns of crime. This promising beginning soon dissipated, however, with resistance to the burden of drawing maps by hand and with a shift of intellectual attention from geographic and statistical patterns of crime to social and individual roots. Even in the 1960s, when police used pins and paper maps to plot the location of crimes, few felt the need to share crime results with the community, with scholars, or even with other parts of local government (Slocum, 1999).
Today, mapping uses computers with greatly increased capacity and is a powerful tool for displaying where problems and resources are and for mobilizing action. More powerful computers allow the development of geographic information systems that include a wide range of information, including data on crime, community perceptions, risk factors, and community resources. Police officials in New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, and many other cities meet to review data displayed on maps and charts, dissect crime patterns, and plan action. New mapping software is letting many more people see the relationship between crime and place. Police departments are regularly publishing crime maps on the Internet and are thereby being held accountable for public safety (Pyle, Hanten, Williams, Pearson, Doyle, Kwofie, 1974).
Crime maps help police identify problems at the block or neighborhood level. In fact, police officers in some locations will soon be able to produce maps of their beat showing events of the previous 24 hours.
Because the boundaries and scales of computer-produced maps are not fixed, maps can be produced that describe patterns and share information at the level of a neighborhood, a ZIP code, a city, a region, or even the entire nation. Thus, the....
