The show has been a showcase for geographic information systems (GIS technology, with the Environmental Systems Research Institutes (ESRI) featured each week). At the core of the tech-arsenal of the fictional police department in Washington, DC, is COMSTAT, a real-life set of data analysis tools and management processes used by law enforcement agencies throughout the country. GIS's are used within COMSTAT for data mining and statistical analysis that ultimately enables police commanders to have a detailed understanding of law enforcement activities and crime patterns in their precincts. In "The District," COMSTAT encourages the fictional police department to map crime incidents; overlay additional information such as demographic and resource data; and perform sophisticated analyses, modeling, and visualization. More specifically, geographic profiling, "hot spot" density visualizations, predictive modeling of street-level drug trafficking, and incident mapping are performed with a GIS on the show. In each episode of the show, crime mapping is used in the process of identifying a problem, visualizing and analyzing information, and mitigating and solving the problem. 5 figures