2 research outputs found
Mapping Crime in its Community Setting: Event Geography Analysis.
Preface to the Internet Edition --
The economics of academic publishing are such that books go out of print fairly
quickly, long before their useful lifetime has expired. This was the case with Mapping
Crime in Its Community Setting, published in 1991 by Springer-Verlag; it predated
the emergence of crime mapping as the powerful crime analysis tool it has become.
We retrieved the copyright from Springer last year and decided that, rather than
republish it in paper, we would put it on the web and make it available for free. The
Library of the University of Illinois at Chicago graciously consented to put store the
book on its "reading room" site (http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/forr/ ).
Publication of our book was followed by the very successful National Institute of
Justice program testing crime mapping elsewhere; called the Drug Market Analysis
Program (with the apt acronym D-MAP), cities from San Diego to Pittsburgh to Jersey
City to Hartford implemented (in San Diego's case, augmented) computerized crime
mapping projects that still flourish. It was also the forerunner of the Chicago Police
Department's ICAM (Information Collection for Automated Mapping) system, which
has been up and running for a half-dozen years.
As its title implies, the book puts computer-based crime mapping in its community
context, where "community" refers both to the police community and the
neighborhoods they serve. We discuss how it can be used to incorporate a true and
sustainable form of community policing, where the police and community
organizations form partnerships to provide communities with the support and
protection they need. Of course, maintaining a partnership of this nature is difficult,
but we feel that it is well worth the effort.
The technological context of this book is now quite dated. This project started five
years after IBM introduced its first personal computer, and the Macintosh had been
out for only two years. For example, all of our "geocoding" was done by hand, and the
data were sent from place to place by "sneaker LAN," that is, by carrying diskettes
from site to site. Yet the project's essential findings are still as applicable today as they
were ten years ago: crime mapping is an excellent tool for use by police analysts and
administrators; its proper implementation requires police organizations to make
substantive changes in the way they do business; and it can be used very effectively
as a platform for building cooperative relationships between police and communities
and for incorporating dynamic mapping and other (non-police) data as a means of
understanding the nature of the communities the police serve. As with any tool, it can
also be used inappropriately. Great care, for example, must be given to maintaining
the confidentiality of the information the database contains, especially concerning
people already victimized, and to attend to unintended organizational consequences
of tool use. These matters all receive attention in the book
American Healthy Homes Survey: A National Study of Residential Pesticides Measured from Floor Wipes
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in collaboration with the United States Environmental Protection Agency conducted a survey measuring lead, allergens, and insecticides in a randomly selected nationally representative sample of residential homes. Multistage sampling with clustering was used to select the 1131 homes of which a subset of 500 randomly selected homes included the collection of hard surface floor wipes. Samples were collected by trained field technicians between June 2005 and March 2006 using isopropanol wetted wipes. Samples were analyzed for a suite of 24 compounds which included insecticides in the organochlorine, organophosphate, pyrethroid and phenylpyrazole classes, and the insecticide synergist piperonyl butoxide. The most commonly detected were permethrin (89%), chlorpyrifos (78%), chlordane (64%), piperonyl butoxide (52%), cypermethrin (46%), and fipronil (40%). Mean and geometric mean (GM) concentrations varied widely among compounds, but were highest for <i>trans</i>-permethrin (mean 2.22 ng/cm<sup>2</sup> and GM 0.14 ng/cm<sup>2</sup>) and cypermethrin (mean 2.9 ng/cm<sup>2</sup> and GM 0.03 ng/cm<sup>2</sup>). Results show that most floors in occupied homes in the U.S. have measurable levels of insecticides that may serve as sources of exposure to occupants