Stories indexed with the term ‘map’

The city of Ann Arbor recently won a technology achievement award from The Public Technology Institute – for the city’s integration of a piece of software called CrimeView Dashboard into police operations. The distinction was mentioned in city administrator Steve Powers’ Sept. 3, 2013 written report to the city council, which was attached to the council’s packet as a standard part of the agenda template.

CrimeView Dashboard is an Omega Group software product used internally by the Ann Arbor police department to help solve crimes. CrimeView is far more robust than Omega Group’s publicly available, web-based crimemapping.com, which provides citizens with crime maps based on data from the most recent six months.

In a phone interview with Chris Baldwin, Omega Group account manager for Ann Arbor, he told The Chronicle Omega views the company’s relationship with AAPD as a partnership. The publicly available crimemapping.com tool, Baldwin said, is relatively lightweight compared to the tools available in CrimeView, but is still useful for educating and informing the public.

As one example of the difference, crimemapping.com gives locations by street blocks, whereas the AAPD has access to the exact street address.

Through CrimeView, AAPD officers also have access to data on all calls for service, not just on the verified incidents. In a telephone interview, AAPD deputy chief Greg Bazick explained that a call for service is not automatically logged as an incident. The call initiates the report, but then it’s reviewed and validated – which means that, in the view of AAPD staff, an incident meeting the description took place. It’s those validated incidents that appear on crimemapping.com

CrimeView allows officers to set up and save standard data queries so that trends and patterns can be spotted, which can drive decisions about how to deploy resources with an eye toward solving crimes. Bazick described how CrimeView played a supporting role in a recent series of home invasions (breaking and entering). That effort involved sharing information with Pittsfield Township,, which also uses the CrimeView Dashboard.

CrimeView was used to plot reported crimes by date, time and location. Because AAPD had the suspect’s home address, known associates, and knew the suspect had no regular access to a vehicle, AAPD could identify the pattern of home invasions geographically, by day of week, and hour of the day, Bazik said. While CrimeView didn’t itself solve the crime, it saved a lot of time compared to the effort it would have taken to compile the information manually.

Bazik described the AAPD as still in the early stages of learning and using the CrimeView Dashboard tool. It’s part of the AAPD’s broader effort to take a data-driven approach to decision making.

That broader effort includes a project that takes a digital approach to officer activity reports. Having easily analyzable data about how officers are spending their time will allow the AAPD to provide a metric that’s important for measuring success in public safety as defined by the Ann Arbor city council. The description of public safety success, developed by the council at a December 2012 retreat, reads in part: “Police officers have between 25-30% of their time available for proactive policing.”

The AAPD started using electronic data sheets for officer activity logs around the beginning of the year. At the council’s July 15, 2013 meeting, AAPD chief John Seto told councilmembers that the department was doing the initial analysis of data that’s been recorded so far. Responding to an emailed query in late August, Seto wrote to The Chronicle that the analysis of timesheets would be reported to the city council sometime in the near future.

At the July 15 council meeting, Seto also briefed councilmembers on the somewhat downward trend for overall crime for the first six months of 2013, compared with the first six months of 2012. For example, based on the publicly available data from crimemapping.com for the additional month of July, The Chronicle counted 249 breaking-and-entering (forced and unforced entry) incidents from January-July 2013, compared to 295 for the same period in 2012.

Slightly more detail on the breaking-and-entering data is provided after the jump. [Full Story]

Tea leaves, tarot cards, crystal balls – predicting the future is a popular pastime. But here at The Chronicle, we decided to take a look at past elections – with an eye towards the approaching Aug. 2 primary elections for the Ann Arbor city council.

Ann Arbor residents are represented by the mayor and 10 other elected members on the city council – two for each of the city’s five wards. Each year, one of the pair of councilmembers stands for re-election to a two-year term. This year, three members of the currently all-Democratic council have contested races in the primary, which falls on Tuesday, Aug. 2.

In Ward 5, incumbent Mike Anglin is challenged by Neal Elyakin. In Ward 3, incumbent Stephen Kunselman is challenged by Marwan Issa and Ingrid Ault. And in Ward 2, incumbent Stephen Rapundalo is challenged by Tim Hull.

Each of the city’s five wards is divided into precincts.

In this article, The Chronicle takes a look at the incumbents’ performance in past elections, mapped out by precinct. Some descriptive generalizations are readily apparent in the data – the strength of incumbents has not been uniform across their respective wards.

And in some cases, it’s possible to offer a speculative analysis that could account for some of those patterns. [Full Story]