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Crime Mapping and the Training Needs of Law Enforcement

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Crime and Technology

Abstract

Since the mid-1980s, reductions in the cost of computing power and digital data storage have combined with a rationalisation of computer operating systems to enable the wide dissemination of a range of new technologies for crime fighting. With the computerisation of police records for statistical and managerial purposes came a realisation that these same records could be employed for crime and intelligence analysis, and in some cases crime mapping. Law enforcement interest in using geographical information systems (GIS) to map the incidence of crime occurred in parallel to research activities that identified patterns in crimes and criminal behaviour in the emerging field of environmental criminology (see, among others, Brantingham and Brantingham 1981; Bottoms and Wiles 1992; Rengert 1992; Bottoms and Wiles 2002). This development of practitioner interest in crime mapping alongside a research field dedicated to understanding the importance of place in offender behaviour and victimisation could be said to mimic and draw from a similar two-pronged thrust within geography. At the time, geographers were developing both GIS and geographical information science.

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Authors
  1. Jerry H. Ratcliffe
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Joint Research Centre on Transnational Crime, Università degli Studi di Trento — Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, Italy

    Ernesto U. Savona (Professor of Criminology, Director of Transcrime) (Professor of Criminology, Director of Transcrime)

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Ratcliffe, J.H. (2004). Crime Mapping and the Training Needs of Law Enforcement. In: Savona, E.U. (eds) Crime and Technology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2924-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2924-0_11

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6746-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-2924-0

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