Introduction: Geographic mapping plays a huge role in the police department since the early 1900's. Police officers used paper maps hanging from a wall with pins to allocate crimes events. As pins got stuck into these maps, spatial patterns begin to emerge. These patterns allow crime in a district to be analyzed. By doing this the police department could come to conclusions that, individual crimes aren't unique random events, but they share common characteristics. Geographic Information Systems (GIS), once a tool used only by mapmakers are slowly going mainstream. Now found in automobiles for driving directions, used by real estate agents to track home sales, and by police departments to solve crimes. A tool once used only by geographers …show more content…
(1) Forward data mapping: Forward data mapping consists of two common applications. (1) the ability to map point locations, and (2) to shade areas reflecting the presence and intensity of a variable. It is used to map attributes gathered in the database files. GIS links this files to a geographic location. The process of forward data mapping is analogous to descriptive mapping, since some type of geographic information and its respective attributes are being described on a map. Point locations can also be referred to as automated pin mapping, because it closely resembles the type of maps used by the police officers for pin mapping. GIS is used by most police agencies, almost only for their forward data-mapping abilities. ( Anna Brendle. 2002) Maps produced by police officers, show the location of the crime represented by one or more case attributes. For example, a robbery will be color coded according to type of location (store, bank, street, etc.) and appear as a …show more content…
Police officers also have greater flexibility in manipulating mapped data through database commands that select and map information based on user-provided criteria. The ability to relate attribute data to a geographic location is useful in determining when and where to deploy police resources in response to a particular crime problem.(Anna Brendle. 2002) (2) Backward data mapping: Backward data mapping differs primarily from forward data mapping in that selection criteria used to construct a map are based on geographic, rather than tabular, information. In backward data mapping, an analyst will have GIS display information based on the relationship between an incident's location and geography. An analyst, for example, may believe that a high concentration of robberies is determined by incidents located within one kilometer of one other. The geographic location of the robbery would first be determined by GIS, and then compute the distance between one robbery location to all other robbery locations. After this operation is performed for all such locations, a map would display only those robbery cases whose closest neighboring robbery location was within a