Innovative Crime Mapping Techniques and Spatial Analysis

摘要

The CUNY - NYPD partnership has operated successfully for three years, in part, with the assistance of funding from the National Institute of Justice, US Department of Justice. Now, as attention moves away from the weekly mapping of incident data within a Geographic Information System (GIS) successfully implemented by NYPD, our partnership has directed attention to new developments in GIS and spatial analyses. In this stage in the development process, it is necessary to overlay the NYPD crime data with other data, such as demographic data, for increased understanding of crime hotspots. The associated problems of map overlays, and their solutions, are discussed here, both as an example of our cooperation and as an example of the requirements needed for good practices in the mapping and analysis of crime data. In overlaying maps of data sets, it is important to be cognizant of the coordinate systems and the map projections of each of the maps. In the United States, projections, datums, units, and coordinate systems can vary widely.