LAPD’s Implementation of Geospatial Intelligence in Human Terrain Mapping

LAPD Slashes Car Crime by Arming Cops – With GeoInt Tech!

Typically, geospatial intelligence is most commonly linked to defence and the military. While this may be true, more and more civilian organisations are utilising the power of geospatial information to radically improve their abilities. Unsurprisingly, the police force is one such area getting involved.

Associate Professor of Criminology, Law, Society & Planning, Policy & Design at the University of California Irvine speaks to DGI's Online Editor Dan Mellins-Cohen about the innovative and highly successful implementation of geospatial intelligence in human terrain mapping by the LAPD to not only catch criminals, but proactively prevent crime.

Video transcript:

Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what you’re going to be talking about in your panel session at DGI 2012?

I’ll be talking about human terrain mapping of urban street gangs in Los Angeles, looking at the social and geographic spaces occupied by gangs as a group and also the individual gang members’ patterns of association.

What are the developments then you’ve seen in geospatial intelligence in your sector over the past few years?

It was very interesting in that when I was over here in the UK about four or five years ago, I was invited to speak on the work that I do on urban street gangs for an audience much like here at DGI, mostly defence, and I couldn’t for the life of me quite understand why they wanted to hear about the work I do on urban street gangs until I listened to another group of presenters throughout the day talk about tribes and groups and Iraq and Afghanistan and realised that the motivation for violence, the reasons that people join these groups/gangs; insurgencies are very similar. It was basically as if one could strike out ‘Afghanistan’, replace it with ‘Los Angeles’ and strike out ‘tribes’, replace it with ‘gangs’.

So that’s really what brought me into this human terrain modelling arena.

What are you going to be speaking about specifically then in your session?

Specifically, just talk about how we use this methodology for trying to understand the construction of gangs and to design effective programmes for reducing gang violence.

And what have you found so far?

We’ve been able to demonstrate that if you understand at the group level the relationships or the rivalries that link gangs together, that there may be certain nodes in a network that may have a larger impact on reducing crime and gun violence than if you were to pick some gang or a set of gangs randomly. So, the data is very important for helping one think about how to allocate resources.

The other thing, from a social science standpoint and understanding the spatial diffusion of violence, that it may not be apparent that it’s just diffusing in terms of geographic neighbours but across neighbours who are linked socially because of the relationship between gangs in those neighbourhoods.

Are any of the findings really surprising or do you think it’s something that’s common sense that you’ve now proven with scientific method?

I think there are some surprising findings. One of the findings to emerge from some work we did years ago in evaluation of a gun violence project is it’s been well established that there’s a diffusion of benefits geographically, but we also demonstrated that by focusing on two nodes and a network of gangs, that the benefits diffused socially through the network and that the rivals of those gangs that were receiving additional resources and attention from the police actually suppressed their activity levels as well.