{"id":1877,"date":"2013-10-15T09:30:30","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T13:30:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mysecuritysign.com\/blog\/?p=1877"},"modified":"2024-06-05T05:36:55","modified_gmt":"2024-06-05T09:36:55","slug":"surveillance-and-location-based-policing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mysecuritysign.com/blog\/surveillance-and-location-based-policing\/","title":{"rendered":"Arrest that house: surveillance and location-based policing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Police work has long been associated with catching perps and criminals. But an emerging body of work has found that crime happens in very specific places<\/i><\/a>: a single house, a certain street corner or a particular park.<\/p>\n

Several studies have shown that crimes are geographically concentrated, with some attributing up to 50 percent of crimes to just 3-5 percent of a city\u2019s addresses and street blocks. Furthermore, these dens of iniquity tend to stay that way over time, reliably producing work for policemen year in and year out.<\/p>\n

\"location-based<\/a>

Abandoned houses can become sites for repeated crimes. From\u00a0perthhdproductions<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Tom Casady, the Public Safety Director of Lincoln, Nebraska, recently crunched the numbers for crime in the city and built a highly refined map of where crimes occurred \u2014 and were most likely to occur again. He found<\/a> that \u201c81 percent of all the crime (14,149 offenses) occurred on only 5 percent of the street segments (689 segments). The top 1 percent of the street segments (138 segments) accounted for 7,148 crimes\u201441 percent of the total.\u201d<\/p>\n

This may not come as a surprise to an experienced beat cop or a junkie who knows that the place to score is at the corner of Main and Jefferson, but linking crime to places rather than people is only just becoming formalized as a method of crime prevention.<\/p>\n

\"location-based<\/a>

Crime-mapping is a key component of location-based policing. From\u00a0Aude<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Based on this research, George Mason University\u2019s Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy developed a Cases of Place<\/a> strategy to urge detectives to focus their activities on high-crime places as opposed to (or in addition to) human suspects. Cases of Places produced a checklist and a guide to help detectives approach the place with the same rigor and thoroughness that they use for human suspects.<\/p>\n

The guide does everything from determining the crime history of the place (much in the same way a detective would pull up a suspect\u2019s rap sheet), to advising detectives on how to look at the place as a suspect<\/a>. How and by whom are the crimes committed? Is it an individual responsible for the crimes, a group of individuals, or is the place itself the primary suspect \u2014 for example, in a high-accident area, the suspect may not be one particular person smashing into one car after another, but a row of bushes blocking the view of on-coming traffic from the cross street.<\/p>\n

\"location-based<\/a>

Monitoring surveillance cameras. From\u00a0Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

The benefits of this approach, besides being strongly supported by research, is that unlike humans, places are stuck right where they are. They don\u2019t go visit their great-aunt in the Poconos, or spend the day at the mall, or move to a different city to start a new life. The places, in a way, are marked as a site of crime and criminals are more likely to commit their crimes there than at the grocery store or a relative’s house.<\/p>\n

In place-based crime, surveillance cameras can play key roles as reliable witnesses. The problem is, once the cameras are up, it may only be a matter of time before the people responsible for making the place a crime hub, move on to less supervised locales.<\/p>\n

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