Abstract
Police departments across the country have turned to geographic information systems (GIS) to identify crime patterns within their jurisdictions, design responses, and evaluate their performance. In addition, many agencies have adopted a geography-based, COMPSTAT-like process to hold police managers accountable for activity within their commands. However, a purely external and descriptive focus fails to take full advantage of all that a true GIS has to offer. This is particularly true when trying to understand complex police-citizen interactions. In this article, we demonstrate how police agencies can use GIS to shift some of their focus to more “internal” matters and take advantage of the inferential capabilities of the geography-based approach. We concentrate on citizen complaints against police in the city of Philadelphia over a two-and-a-half-year period (1998–2000). Data include the type of complaint, the location of the incident, the home address of the complainant, and a variety of census measures. Analytic tools used include ArcView GIS (Environmental Systems Research Institute, 1999) and CrimeStat (Levine, 1999). Future directions for police research and practice are discussed.
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