Intelligence-Led Policing: A Case Study

Crime and society are linked, for better or worse. Society is strongly affected by crime due to the cost of crime, as well as the decline in the quality of life that citizens suffer as a result of crime. Since there is a relationship associated with crime and the quality of life then reducing crime should be one of the top priorities of a police department. However, reducing crime is a major challenge for any police department around the world. The biggest hurdle facing police departments in their crime reduction mission is the issue of staffing shortages. Many agencies across the United States are having trouble recruiting new police officers and keeping experienced seasoned officers on the police force. Staffing shortages are due to

In a preliminary report the FBI noted there is an overall increase in violent crimes. Based on data provided by 12,879 law enforcement agencies throughout the United States, murders have increased 6.2 percent and aggravated assaults have increased 2.3 percent since 2014 (The Federal Bureau of Invesigations 2015). Higher crime and staff shortages have many agencies thinking outside the box for ways to reduce crime. Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) is a concept developed from this outside the box thinking. The United States Department of Justice defines ILP as information plus analysis equals intelligence (Peterson 2005). The ILP concept aided in the creation of many crime fighting tools that can be used in modern policing. I have focused my research on two of the crime fighting tools created by the ILP concept. I will be examining the Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) and the Risk Terrain Model (RTM) to determine their usefulness in implementing the ILP concept within the Gulfport Police Department in Gulfport, Mississippi. If my assumptions are correct, I will show through studies performed using DDACTS and RTM that Gulfport Police can reduce crime in high crime areas using the relationship between the types of crimes, the landscape, and the number of traffic incidents (Accidents and Citations) in a given

miles and is home to an estimated 71,750 people according to the latest population estimate provided by the United States Census Bureau. The Gulfport Police Department (GPD) is responsible for keeping the residents and visitors of Gulfport safe by patrolling the whole area. In 2015 the GPD faced a staffing shortage, with an average of 1.4 officers per 1,000 inhabitants. Well below the national average. As the staffing shortage continues GPD needs to utilize the data they already obtain to analyze how they approach the issue of reducing crime with the staff they have. One way to utilize the data is by using an approach called DDACTS. GPD would benefit from using DDACTS by effectively deploying officers and other resources. DDACTS is an operational paradigm that analyzes data to help reduce social harms such as crime and traffic collisions (Bruce 2016). In a study conducted of the College Station Police Department in 2010 by Pei-Fen Kuo, concluded that by using the DDACTS approach police departments could reduce officers dispatch time when crime and traffic data was analyzed (Kuo