City Maps Crime Activity
Florida’s Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office’s Operation Showdown, a crime prevention operation, uses crime mapping to completely understand a specific area.
A 10-block-long, six-block-wide quadrant of downtown Jacksonville was found by crime mapping to have high levels of prostitution, drugs, and gun violations, which allows officers to focus on the area and its specific issues.
Mapping also helps in crime prevention by allowing the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office Community Affairs unit and city services to increase community participation in specific crime prevention projects and address community concerns, such as abandoned buildings or suspected drug houses.
Crime mapping analysts are sorting through over 1 million incident reports for the city each year to develop an in-depth look at crime trends.
Weekly updates on crime are emailed to police substations where officers quickly use the information to predict drug activity and other trends. The information is used to prevent crime and to prevent certain areas from becoming crime hot spots.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Florida Times-Union (02/10/04) P. B1; Treen, Dana.