Abigail White writes in:

I’m still settling in at my agency and getting an analysis program rolling. Before I came here, I volunteered with a nonprofit and I had partnered 2 years running with a local university to provide real-world opportunities for their 4th-year undergrad IT students to do a final project. Basically, I was the project owner and they were supposed to build an application, modify software for my needs, or do some project along those lines to get on-the-ground experience. The school just reached out again and asked if I wanted to do a project with them again this year with whatever organization I’m currently working with.

I really want to tell them yes because it’s a tremendous opportunity for these students to know about how IT can interface with the field of law enforcement (and to get some IT minds working on law enforcement problems). Plus my agency actually may want to hire in-house IT at some point so it could be a good way for them to screen some people and make a job offer at the end of the school year.

Do you have any ideas for projects that would be good to build bridges between the IT industry and law enforcement? I need to come up with something good before I pitch it to command. The best I can think of so far is a phone-based app where officers could record the lat and long of their exact location and add info about the environment around them – ultimately so we could start getting good data for risk terrain modeling (i.e., at this location, there’s an abandoned house, at another location, there’s an unoccupied house where the lawn hasn’t been mown, etc.) I know that’s not much to go on, but I would love to hear any thoughts you have!

And here is what I said off-the-cuff in response:

It is hard for me to gauge feasibility. In terms of app maybe a nice public facing dashboard (maps/charts), with public info. Can pitch as something for community group meetings for example. That is a good marriage between IT (worrying about the server) and crime analysis (queries to feed the dashboard) I think.

Phone app to me sounds too hard. Even if you build it very difficult to get data security down and the PD to actually use it. Public dashboard is for everyone and no security worries. (Building a phone app seems pretty far outside what an IT person would typically do within a PD.)

RTM in terms of building a predictive model is feasible, but making a nice way for the PD to consume it is more difficult (so is more traditional crime analysis type stuff). But could maybe make sense just internally.

I have seen someone try to do the video narratives with officers (similar to your app idea, just using gopro). It is neat, but not sure it results in very actionable intelligence to be honest.

This is just me rambling though. Typically for projects I start with something the PD will find useful based on my own observations. So would look for regular things done low-tech now by the PD that can maybe be automated or improved upon with some coding work.

Sharing here with the hopes others will have more ideas. It is similar in scope to say a really good undergrad or a masters level thesis type project I would say as well.