Skip to local navigation | Skip to main content

Software

NIJ does not exercise control over external Web sites. Read our Exit Notice.

CrimeStat III

Developed by Ned Levine & Associates

CrimeStat is a spatial statistics program for the analysis of crime incident locations, developed by Ned Levine & Associates under grant 2002-IJ-CX-0007 from the National Institute of Justice. The program is Windows-based and interfaces with most desktop GIS programs. The program provides supplemental statistical tools to aid law enforcement agencies and criminal justice researchers in their crime mapping efforts. CrimeStat is being used by many police departments around the country as well as by criminal justice and other researchers. The new version is 3.0 (CrimeStat III) and is available free of charge.

The program inputs incident locations (e.g., robbery locations) in 'dbf', 'shp', ASCII or ODBC-compliant formats using either spherical or projected coordinates. It calculates various spatial statistics and writes graphical objects to ArcView®, MapInfo®, Atlas*GISTM, Surfer® for Windows, and ArcView Spatial Analyst©.

The statistics cover spatial description and distance analysis (for describing the general spatial pattern of crimes), hot spot analysis (for identifying concentrations of crashes), interpolation (for visualizing crime concentrations over a large area), space-time analysis (for understanding temporal and spatial interaction in offender behavior), and journey-to-crime estimation (for estimating the likely residence location of a serial offender). New in version 3.0 is a module for crime travel demand modeling, widely used in transportation planning. It allows a crime analyst to model crime trips over a metropolitan area and to make reasonable guesses at the travel mode and likely routes taken. It can also be used to model possible interventions.

CrimeStat III is accompanied by sample data sets and a manual that gives the background behind the statistics and examples. The manual was fully re-written and also discusses applications of CrimeStat developed by other analysts and researchers. The crime travel demand module is fully documented with six new chapters and a chapter with case studies on Chicago and Las Vegas by Richard Block and Dan Helms.

The software is available for free download, along with full documentation, from NACJD (National Archive of Criminal Justice Data) at ICPSR.

FacilityCop

Adapted from SchoolCop, for use in correctional institutions.

FacilityCop is a version of SchoolCop, modified by Temple University, that is geared for the corrections environment. The program can be used to map, analyze, and keep records of incidents within a building environment, such as a prison. The program can also be used to generate tabular reports, graphs, and charts. FacilityCop is available as a free download.


School COP

Developed by Abt Associates

The School Crime Operations Package (School COP) is a software application designed for entering, analyzing, and mapping incidents that occur in and around schools. Target users are persons responsible for enforcing discipline and safety regulations, investigating crime and other incidents, and planning violence prevention initiatives at elementary, middle, and high schools. School COP can be used at a single school or at the school district level. School COP includes a sample database of incidents that illustrate the package's search, reporting, and mapping capabilities. On-line help is also available.

School COP that runs on Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, and XP computers is available for download. The package is free. Abt Associates Inc. developed School COP under a cooperative agreement with the National Institute of Justice (Award No. 1999-LT-VX-K017). More details and software download for School COP available from Abt Associates Inc.


Crime Analysis Unit Developer Kit

Developed by NLECTC-Rocky Mountain's Crime Mapping & Analysis Program (CMAP)

The Crime Analysis Unit Developer Kit includes a collection of documents, publications, examples, and tools has been researched, collected, and made publicly available by the Crime Mapping & Analysis Program (CMAP). The CAU Developer's Kit contains numerous free software applications, including:

  • Two GIS programs - A complete, self-contained desktop Geographic Information Systems.
  • Two Geographic Profiling utilities - Dragnet-K, the stand-alone original GP software from the University of Liverpool, and Ian Oldfield’s GP Spreadsheet for Excel.
  • The Crime Analysis Spatial Extension - Tactical crime analysis tools for ArcGIS similar to the USGS Animal Movements Extension for ArcView.
  • Two Link-charting programs - Network, organizational, flow, and linkage diagram design software utilities with analytical functions.
  • Six Statistics programs - Complete and robust statistics as powerful as any expensive application.
  • OpenOffice - A complete office program suite that includes a word processor, spreadsheet/grapher, relational database, presentation/slideshow, diagram tool, and mathematical modeling utility.

All software is provided free of charge by CMAP and the developers for use by the US law enforcement community.


CASE (Crime Analysis Spatial Extension)

Developed by NLECTC-Rocky Mountain's Crime Mapping & Analysis Program (CMAP)

The Crime Mapping & Analysis Program (CMAP), a program of the National law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center - Rocky Mountain Region (NLECTC-RM) has released, on January 25, 2005, CMAP CASE (Crime Analysis Spatial Extension) for ESRI’s ArcGIS 8/9 GIS software.

CMAP CASE contains the spatial functions we have found analysts and investigators turn to more often to find where an offender lives and where he or she may strike next. Until recently, users of ArcView 3.x software relied on a set of tools freely distributed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) called: "Animal Movement Extension." The Animal Movement Extension is a well written add-on that provides ArcView 3.x users will a variety of spatial tools. Unfortunately, with the transition of the ESRI 3.x software to 8x and now version 9x, all extensions written for previous versions of ArcView, which users relied on, are unusable. CMAP CASE provides the core functions of Animal Movement for the 8 and 9 platforms. These functions include: spider diagram, 1, 2 and 3 standard deviation ellipses, Nearest Neighbor test for spatial randomness, sequencing, and minimum convex polygon. We’ve even added a feature that calculates and defines a "Study Area" useful for further comparative analysis.

CMAP CASE is freely available from their website: www.crimeanalysts.net. It contains a robust help file and supporting documentation explaining how these spatial functions are used to analyze crime. Anyone who has attended our advanced training, workshops, or conference presentations knows how CMAP utilized these fundamental spatial functions found in the Animal Movement extension in its teachings. Fortunately, we are now able to continue to offer these lessons using CASE.

Law Enforcement agencies are welcome to contact CMAP for assistance in installing and using CASE. A very big thanks should go to the USGS for originally automating these spatial techniques for ArcView 3.x, enabled analysts to analyze crime more effectively and efficiently.

Date Entered: January 8, 2008