A Brief History of Crime Mapping

Interestingly, the earliest efforts at crime mapping can be traced to the roots of the discipline of
criminology itself. In the early 19th century, a number of studies examined the distribution of crime in
France and England. Brantingham and Brantingham (1991a) provided an overview of some of the
findings of the main studies from this era. Guerry and Quetelet mapped crimes in France at the
department level and found that crimes were not distributed evenly across departments. They also
found that there was stability over time in both areas with high crime and areas with low crime over
time. These findings were echoed in England with studies by Plint, Glyde, and Mayhew.

In the United States, Shaw and McKay’s (1942) seminal study of juvenile delinquency in Chicago made
extensive use of crime maps. Shaw and McKay borrowed Park and Burgess’s (1924) ecological model
and divided the city into five different zones. They found that the zone adjacent to the central business
district, the zone of transition, perpetually suffered from the highest rates of juvenile delinquency and
other social problems regardless of the specific ethnic group occupying the zone at the time. This
research was instrumental in popularizing social disorganization theory and inspired a number of similar
mapping projects in Chicago; Philadelphia; Richmond, Virginia; Cleveland, Ohio; Birmingham, Alabama;
Denver, Colorado; Seattle, Washington; and other cities.

Accompanying these early efforts in crime mapping were developments in the profession of policing
that provided additional opportunities for crime mapping. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the
professionalization movement in policing encouraged police organizations to compile statistics
documenting the extent of crime in their jurisdictions. In fact, one of the main justifications for the
creation of Federal Bureau of Investigation was for the explicit purpose of documenting the extent of
crime in the United States through the Uniform Crime Reporting program (Mosher, Miethe, & Phillips,
2002). During this time, many agencies began compiling crime statistics and conducting analyses of
crime data. Crime mapping was primarily done using pin maps, which were very time-consuming and
provided only a basic visualization of crime patterns.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were critical for the development of crime mapping. In 1966, the
Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis developed SYMAP (Synagraphic Mapping
System), one of the first widely distributed computerized mapping software programs. The
Environmental Science and Research Institute was founded in 1969 and in the subsequent decades
emerged as one of the top distributors of GIS software, including the current ArcView and ArcGIS
software packages. Also around this time, the U.S. Census Bureau began the ambitious GBF-DIME
(Geographic Base Files and Dual Independent Map Encoding) project, which was used to create digitized
street maps for all cities in the United States during the 1970 census (Mark, Chrisman, Frank, McHaffie,
& Pickles, 1997). These advances were necessary for the development of GIS programs used in crime
mapping.

The use of GIS programs for mapping has been the most important advance in the field of crime
mapping. There are several important advantages in using virtual maps instead of physical maps. First,
computers have dramatically reduced the time and effort required to produce crime maps. Given the
relatively low cost and user-friendliness of many of these software programs, it no longer requires a
substantial investment for agencies that wish to engage in crime mapping. Second, these GIS programs
reduce the amount of error associated with assigning geographic coordinates to crime events. Third,
virtual maps are much more flexible than physical maps, allowing researchers and crime analysts to
compare the geographic distribution of crimes against other characteristics of the area under
investigation (e.g., census bureau information, city planning and zoning maps, and maps produced by
other agencies). Finally, GIS and other spatial analysis software provide powerful statistical tools for
analyzing and detecting patterns of criminal activity that cannot be detected through simple visual
inspection.

In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, a crisis of confidence in traditional police practices emerged following
the results of studies, such as the Kansas City Preventative Patrol experiment, that suggested that the
police were not effective in combating crime (Weisburd & Lum, 2005). Goldstein’s (1979) problem-
oriented policing emerged as a response to this crisis and emphasized that policing should involve
identifying emerging crime and disorder problems and working to address the underlying causes of
these problems. Academic interests in the field of criminology also began to shift during this time. While
many criminologists were concerned with causes of crime that were outside the sphere of influence of
police agencies (e.g., economic depravation, differential association, and social bonds), a number of
researchers, such as Jeffery (1971), Newman (1972), and Cohen and Felson (1979), began discussing
factors that contribute to the occurrence of crime that were more amenable to intervention. The
combination of the shift in theoretical focus in criminology and the shift in the philosophy of policing
yielded new opportunities for crime mapping and initiated a resurgence of research on both the
geography of crime as well as crime prevention strategies involving crime mapping.

Although the first instances of computerized crime mapping occurred in the mid-1960s in St. Louis,
Missouri, the adoption of computerized crime mapping across the United States remained relatively
slow. Although a number of agencies, in particular in larger jurisdictions, became early adopters of
computerized crime mapping technology, the large period of growth in computerized crime mapping did
not begin until the late 1980s and early 1990s (Weisburd & Lum, 2005). The rate of adoption of crime
mapping among departments greatly increased as desktop computers became cheaper and more
powerful and GIS software became easier to use and more powerful. The Compstat program, which
started in 1994 in New York City, emphasized crime mapping as a central component to strategic police
planning and helped popularize crime mapping among police agencies. With assistance from the Office
of Community Oriented Police Services and the National Institute of Justice, a large number of
departments adopted computerized crime mapping practices. By 1997, approximately 35% of
departments with more than 100 officers reported using crime mapping (Weisburd & Lum, 2005).