U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Predicting Demand for Service for Future Developments

NCJ Number
233971
Journal
Geography & Public Safety Volume: 2 Issue: 4 Dated: March 2011 Pages: 11-13
Author(s)
Philip Mielke
Editor(s)
Marian Haggard
Date Published
March 2011
Length
3 pages
Annotation

This article presents a guideline for use in predicting future demand for police services.

Abstract

This article presents detailed steps for police departments to use in their efforts to predict policing needs required as a result of their city's growth and planned development. The article describes the types of data that need to be prepared: land use data from the city's planning department/land use planning commission, incident data from the police department's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, and time-spent data from the police department's CAD system and records management system. The article then presents the technical steps for processing the data: Step 1 - join the time-spent database to the incident feature class; Step 2 - spatially join incident data and the joined time-spent database to the land use layer; and Step 3 - create a sum table from the outputs of step 1 and step 2. Finally, the author provides advice on how police departments can interpret the results of the data analysis. 4 figures and 6 notes