Until a decade ago, few criminal justice agencies had any capability to create crime maps and few investigators had the resources or patience to examine the spatial distribution of crime. Today, however, crime mapping is of great interest to both scholars and practitioners. This introduction examines some early examples of crime mapping, focusing on factors that inhibited the widespread integration of mapping into crime prevention research and practice in the past. It examines innovations in mapping technologies and crime prevention theory that have recently brought crime mapping to the center of trends in crime prevention. The final section of the chapter introduces the rest of the book's chapters and discusses how they illustrate the many uses of mapping in crime prevention. This opening chapter also examines the pitfalls and problems that researchers and practitioners are likely to encounter in developing and analyzing maps, and the potential advances in crime mapping that may appear in the future. Figures, notes, references