After a series of reported criminal incidents near Grounds, the most recent involving a parking lot armed robbery, area officials are going increasingly high tech to make Charlottesville safe.
Since 1998, Systems Engineering Prof. Donald Brown and other researchers have been working on a program that uses information from police databases to draw graphs and maps, allowing police to visualize statistics. Before the implementation of this program, it took specially-trained experts hours to compile meaningful data.
The Regional Crime Analysis Program, a Virginia Institute for Justice Information System initiative, is slated for eventual use throughout the Commonwealth.
The program has met with much enthusiasm - so much that last October, Governor James S. Gilmore III (R) gave Brown an award for the most innovative use of technology in higher education.
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The system has been tested in Albemarle County, Richmond, Charlottesville and University police departments. There are also plans to test the program in Fairfax Country and possibly the Roanoke area.
"The goal of it is to help both in preventing crimes and in solving crimes and helping analysts find out what trends are in an area," Brown said.
Police recognize the efficiency of this program.
"If you see something spiking on a graph, you can immediately see that something is going on," University Police Capt. Michael Coleman said.
The ReCAP system works by taking information from databases compiled from police reports.
For example, if a 911 call reports an armed robbery, an officer would investigate that call and fill out an incident report which is then entered into a database. The ReCAP system reads through the data and compares the times, places and types of crimes as well as several other variables to find any links that might lead to the conviction of repeat offenders or predict future crimes.
"The information I can gather from a visual picture in 15 seconds used to take two days," Albemarle County crime analyst Mike Schnurm said.
Only recently have such crime analysis programs come into use. In most of the country, crime analysts still use individual database queries rather than programs such as ReCAP.
The ReCAP project was first cocieved of in 1994 but major work began in 1998. At that time, undergraduate and graduate students began working in tandem to improve and update the system as they received feedback from local police departments. Currently, teams of fourth-year systems engineering majors work on the project in groups of four as part of their senior theses.
The Deptartment of Justice has developed other crime analysis systems, but ReCAP is unique because it combines spatial comparisons, information that deals with location and temporal comparisons dealing with time. It also tests for patterns in the frequencies and types of crimes and can alert police when a certain category of crime is occurring above or below average frequency for a given period.
But administering the ReCAP system can be a difficult task.
The full execution of the ReCAP system requires the consistent attention of a special administrator and is therefore only feasible in larger regional and metropolitan areas.
"The regional program requires a separate administrator, and smaller departments don't always have staff available to fill such a position," ReCAP Program Director Jason Dalton said.
But revisions of the current ReCAP system may make it more versatile and easier for smaller departments to use.
Fourth-year Engineering student Mark Sameit is now working with Dalton and a group of fourth-year Engineering students to design a scaled-down version of the original ReCAP system.
The new version will cater to smaller jurisdictions like Charlottesville. The new version may even be available over the Internet.
"We are working on a small edition of ReCAP. It will have all the same features of ReCAP but will be easier to install and use," Sameit said.
But the new version is not a replacement, Dalton said. The current version will continue to be used in the larger regions for which it was designed.
ReCAP has been greeted with favorable reviews from police departments where it was tested. ReCAP is being updated constantly and is lined up for statewide use, a scale where it can be effective in fighting crime.
"The ReCAP program has a lot of potential, but they have to keep developing new features to stay ahead," Coleman said.
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