Through a liaison between the National Law Enforcement Corrections and Technology Center (NLECTC)-Rocky Mountain’s Crime Mapping & Analysis Program (CMAP) and the University of Denver, research evaluating spatial forecasting techniques was undertaken by graduate student John Van Auken during March 2005. Law enforcement agency survey results indicated a range of mapping methods used by law enforcement agencies across the country, including Standard Deviation Rectangles, Visual Approximation, Kernel Smoothing, and Minimum Convex Polygons. Van Auken conducted his own testing of the top five reported techniques and determined that Density Analysis was the best predictor of crime, followed by Hot Spot Analysis. Another agency, the Institute of the Spatial Analysis of Crime (ISAC) is conducting research on crime mapping in order to develop a free practical software package for geographic profiling and crime series forecasting. The agency is at work to determine which of the various crime mapping methods is most accurate for which type of crime analysis. The police use of forecasting has been spurred by the development of electronic police records, advances in street maps for spatial data processing, advances in criminological theory for crime model specification, and improvement in police management that places an emphasis on performance measures and accountability. Textboxes include information on the Kansas City Regional Crime Analysis and Geographic Information Systems project and on the location crime analysis information. Exhibits