INSIDE the Lakeland Police Department

Chasing a Laser - Predictive Policing

I am a confirmed cat-lover with three felines currently living in our house. One of the ways I play with them is to take a laser pointer and aim the beam of light on the floor. Watching them eagerly chase after the laser and try to catch the point of light with their paws gives them some exercise after lounging around the house all day (and admittedly is somewhat entertaining to me).

Their futile attempts to capture the disappearing light is also a good analogy to the challenges of chasing crime trends in law enforcement. The cats seemingly always try to catch the light where they last saw it rather than go to where the light will be next. (I know what you're thinking - how is a cat supposed to predict where I will aim the light next, so bear with me here.)

The same concept really applies to crime fighting - we often go to the spot of the most recent crime rather than head to where the next crime is most likely to occur. That is true because predicting crime is a real challenge, but it is an evolving aspect of our profession - something called predictive policing. Chief Casady with the Lincoln (NE) Police Department has written extensively on this subject in his blog.

We continue to look at crime trends on a daily basis, using available technology to identify whatever patterns might exist so as to offer some prediction of where crime may occur next. I offer two recent success stories.

The Winn-Dixie store on Ariana Street was burglarized during the first part of November. We responded to the late night alarm call to investigate further. Our patrol officers and surveillance officers knew of a pattern to these crimes and predicted other Winn Dixie stores were likely to get hit as well that night. Surveillance was established at the store on Lakeland Highlands Road where officers waited in the shadows. The officers patiently watched as the suspects arrived and broke into the store a short time later. Arrests were made at the scene.

Last night our surveillance officers were in a neighborhood where we have been experiencing some home and vehicle burglaries off the North Crystal Lake area. A subject was spotted roaming the area around 1:15 AM this morning, so our officers began covert surveillance. We eventually watched the subject, a juvenile, commit a burglary to an unlocked truck. He was arrested at the scene, and a search following the arrest revealed he was armed with a three-foot long sword, so he was charged with armed burglary.

Now I am not suggesting we are able at this point to accurately predict when and where crime is going to occur, but it is worth mentioning how our use of technology is giving us a real-time ability to analyze crime trends and deploy resources where we think crime is likely to occur.

And as a reminder, anyone can create a crime map of significant events in our community or your neighborhood by going to our online crime mapping data at SpotCrime.com. You can also sign up to receive e-mail crime alerts for what is happening in your neighborhood.

My cats do get tired of chasing but never catching the laser after a while, and our officers get tired of chasing crime as well. Our ability to be where crime is likely to occur and then catch them in the act is very rewarding to our folks. Wonder where the next crime is about to happen?

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

Developing Performance Management Best Practices

The recent Senior Leadership meeting for all City departments focused on performance management, that is the process of measuring what you do and then finding ways to do it better. It's something that LakelandPD has been involved with for many, many years.

This year's meeting, an initial step in preparing for the annual retreat for City Commissioners next year, emphasized not only measuring what you do (outputs) but to also measure what your results are (outcomes). Trying to measure results (particularly in police work) is more complex than it seems, but if done right links outcomes with a strategic plan to report on how well an organization achieves its goals.

This is all very timely for the City of Lakeland as you may have seen or heard about a recent directive from the White House that requires federal agencies to produce systems where government data can be accessed online in a transparent, understandable format.

It seems like performance measures have been a key element of our operations forever at LakelandPD, and we're committed to transparency in reporting both our outputs and outcomes. The challenge is to design a way to accomplish this so the information is succinct and easily understood by the public without getting bogged down in the data.

We publish crime stats on our website and provide access to daily maps of crime in the community or your neighborhood. We also uploaded key performance measures until earlier this year when we changed data managements software and had to begin a lengthy process to change our reports. (We're still working on that one.)

Our goal for now is to create new online reports that will provide the performance data most often requested from the public. (It seems like the current business phrase for all of this is "performance dashboards.") Below are samples of performance dashboards for violent and property crimes we are developing. If all goes well, they will be uploaded later this weekend and will become part of a comprehensive redesign of our website. (More on that another day.)

 

As always, your comments and feedback are appreciated.

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

Crime - A Small Part of Our Workload

One of the blogs we follow everyday is The Chief's Corner from Chief Tom Casady at the Lincoln (NE) Police Department. Chief Casady is a really sharp individual with a keen interest in crime analysis, crime data, and community policing.

In a recent blog posting, he noted how crime in his community accounted for approximately 8.9% of Lincoln PD's overall workload. Does that seem unusual to you?

In reality, that percentage is right on target for many police agencies. Our numbers in Lakeland indicated UCR Part I Crime (homicide, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft) accounted for a little over 6% of our total workload last year.

You may wonder how that can be?

The vast array of calls for service we get on a daily basis only include reports of Part I crime a small portion of the time. Traffic crash calls, disturbances, various police services like checking on someone's welfare or false alarm calls, directed patrols, and traffic enforcement comprise a big part of our total workload. While it's true that preventing crime and investigating reported crime is our primary mission, there is so much more to what we do everyday.

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

Charting Crime Trends

January always brings about the publication of annual crime stats for the past year. Initial numbers are showing a slight reduction in overall crime and property crime with a little bigger decrease in violent crime. We are in the process of auditing our UCR data in preparation for publishing the 2008 crime stats later this month.

In the mean time, I recently looked over the Weekly Crime Trend Charts for 2006 - 2008, a tool that we use on a weekly basis to identify emerging crime trends. For a "data geek" like me, these charts are a quick visual overview of crime numbers in comparison to previous years.

I share these charts with you so you can see how we monitor crime trends every week. Let me know if there is any interest in publishing these charts on a more frequent basis.

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

Lakeland Police Release September 2008 UCR Data Report

The crime data for the September_2008_UCR Report have been released. Overall year-to-date crime is down 5% from the same period last year. Violent crime is down 22% and property crime is down 3%.

Our web site contains crime data from previous years, too. If you are interested in learning more about the UCR crime reporting system, visit the FBI's UCR web page.

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

November 2007 UCR Figures Released

The November 2007 Uniform Crime Report is now available on the Department's website. Please note these figures through the first 11 months of the year are preliminary pending our end of the year audit, but they do show a basic overview of reported crime in Lakeland.

Our complete annual report of crime will be released in February following submission to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and confirmation of the numbers.

- Asst Chief Bill LePere

Traffic Safety: Something's Working in Lakeland

One of the more difficult aspects of measuring police performance is to determine if what you are doing is really working in the field. We refer to this as measuring outcomes versus outputs.

Unlike a sterile science lab, cops are often unable to use the basic scientific method of measuring conditions before hand, applying some type of intervention, and then measuring things afterward do determine if what you did made a difference. And because we try so many things at once, it is difficult to say which strategy (if any) changed things or if chance simply occurred. (Apologies to all of my former science teachers and statistics professors for simplifying this explanation.)

Take traffic safety for instance...

We rely on the Three Es - Education, Engineering, and Enforcement - to improve traffic safety in Lakeland. One of the ways we determine our success is the by the number traffic crashes reported to the police. The theory goes something like this; you educate drivers, you design safety roadway systems, and you give tickets to traffic violators. In the end we hope to have less crashes today than yesterday.

Something is working in Lakeland...

According to data from our CAD system, our Planning and Research Section reports traffic crashes of all types (from the least serious to the most serious) are down 4.6% for the first seven months of 2007 as compared to the same period last year. P&R examined data from the City of Lakeland's Traffic Operations for the more serious crashes that result in a report being written during the first six months of the year. That analysis found the more serious crashes in 2007 were down 17% from 2006 and estimated amount of property damage down 9%.

Think about it - more drivers on the roads and less crashes. Whether it's education, engineering, or enforcement, something is working in Lakeland.

-Asst Chief Bill LePere

When is a Police Department Considered to be Good?

Here's something to think about regarding police performance measures -

Is a police department good when they are doing their job by making lots of arrests and issuing lots of traffic citations, or is a police department good when they do not make lots of arrests?

Looked at another way, does making arrests and issuing citations make a police department good at promoting public safety?

If not, how do you tell if your police department is considered to be good?

Tell me what you think...

-Asst Chief Bill LePere