This article presents a guideline for use in predicting future demand for police services.
This article presents detailed steps for police departments to use in their efforts to predict policing needs required as a result of their city's growth and planned development. The article describes the types of data that need to be prepared: land use data from the city's planning department/land use planning commission, incident data from the police department's computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, and time-spent data from the police department's CAD system and records management system. The article then presents the technical steps for processing the data: Step 1 - join the time-spent database to the incident feature class; Step 2 - spatially join incident data and the joined time-spent database to the land use layer; and Step 3 - create a sum table from the outputs of step 1 and step 2. Finally, the author provides advice on how police departments can interpret the results of the data analysis. 4 figures and 6 notes