I will be presenting at the ACJS (Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences) conference in Denver in a few days. My talk will be on some of the work I have been conducting with the Albany Police Department via the Finn Institute (Rob Worden and Sarah McLean are co-authors on the presentation). The title is Making stops smart: Predicting arrest rates from discretionary police stops at micro places in Albany, NY and here is the abstract:

Police stops are one of the most invasive, but regularly used crime control tactics by police. Similar to how focusing police resources at hot spots of crime can improve police efficiency, here we examine the spatial variation in arrest rates at micro places (street segments and intersections) in Albany, NY. Using data from over 240,000 discretionary police stops, we fit random effects logistic regression models to predict the probability of an arrest at different micro places. We show that like hot spots, there are examples of high arrest rate locations next to low arrest rate locations. Using a simulation, we show that if one displaced stops from low arrest locations to high arrest locations, one could make half as many stops but still have the same number of total arrests.

Here is a funnel chart of the arrest hit rates at micro-places across the city. You can see quite a bit of extra variation in arrest rates to attempt to explain.

I am giving this at 8 am on Thursday (see Event #185 in the program)

There will be two other presentations at the moment (Ling Wu is not going to make it), and they are:

• Results from a victim generated crime mapping software, Zavin Nazaretian et al. – Indiana University of PA
• Spatial analysis of aggravated assault and homicide crime scene, arrest and offender residence locations in Houston, TX, Elishewah Weisz – Sam Houston

So if you are interested in crime mapping stuff it should be a good session.

Feel free to bug me if you see me around at ACJS.

Also before I forget, my co-workers are presenting a poster on analysis of Syracuse Truce – a focused deterrence gang intervention. The posters are on Friday, so I won’t be around unfortunately. The title is Gangs, groups, networks, and deterrence: An evaluation of Syracuse Truce. (See poster #45 in the same program I linked to earlier.) Rob and Kelly will at least be manning the poster though – so you can go and bug them about the details!

Here is a picture of the reach of call-ins for one particular gang. The idea is for those who attended call ins to spread the message to other members. So this graph evaluates how well the call-ins would be expected to reach all of the members of the gang.

If you are wondering what I do for my job – yes I pretty much just make maps and graphs all day long 😉