True Crime

In a low-income Massachusetts apartment complex that never before saw enough crime to grab the attention of its owner's safety director, property managers suddenly were scrubbing graffiti from hallway walls every morning. Residents feared the colorful drawings and scribbled slang were evidence that gangs roamed the inner-city complex during the night.

Managers there were primed to call the cops, step up security, and train cameras on every hallway in their quest to catch the graffiti artists. But when they approached Thaddeus Miles, director of public safety for the quasi-governmental Mass Housing—which oversees that property and 600 others around the state—he had another idea.

Miles reviewed a history of the complex's crime reports and asked a security vendor to work up a profile of criminal activity in the surrounding neighborhood over the past year. Both reports turned up empty: no gang activity, assaults, or robberies.

A bit of sleuthing uncovered the culprits: Crayon-wielding 9- and 10-year-olds “at that ‘wannabe' stage” who were unsupervised in the afternoons, recalls Miles. “There wasn't any green space, and you had a lot of kids. They didn't have anything else to do.”

They do now: Miles installed a computer room on the premises and invited the local college to send its education majors over after school to teach the kids about technology. The graffiti is gone.

Miles' method is called crime mapping—using prior crime statistics from the apartment complex and its neighborhood to predict the community's risk for future trouble. Combined with background checks of potential tenants and other routine prevention strategies, crime mapping can contribute significantly to a risk-assessment plan that helps a safety staff decide where it needs heavier or lighter security.

“One of the best ways to predict annual crime rates is to know what the crime rate was the year before,” notes Matthew Giblin, an assistant professor of criminal justice at York College in Pennsylvania.

Crime mapping's crystal ball has been embraced by risk assessors responsible for security at hotels, banks, college campuses, and, on a more limited basis, multifamily companies. Just half a dozen multifamily companies use the technology as part of their security strategies, compared with 21 of the top 25 Fortune 100 companies that subscribe to crime maps and reports from Exton, Pa., vendor CAP Index, says company president Jon Groussman.

The service scores a property's risk for homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and car theft using police reports, FBI statistics, loss reports from the company's own clients, and offender and victim surveys. It also mixes in demographic data about the neighborhood: education and income levels; how transient the population is; and what kind of housing surrounds the property.

The local score compares the property's risk with sites around the country, in the state, and in the county.

The calculation does not factor in the age, race, or ethnic backgrounds of community residents because the data is used by landlords.

It also isn't marketed as a stand-alone risk assessment tool, says Groussman, a former liability consultant who says the firm's scores are on target 80 percent of the time. “We don't want this to be the end-all,” he says. “We know in [the multifamily] industry, you need to do more.”

At Memphis-based Mid-America Apartment Communities, which owns 133 properties in the Southeast, risk managers do a lot more. “We get crime maps on every location,” says Doug Clark, director of risk management. His staff then couples that data with incident reports from Mid-America's complexes—a statistic the CAP Index does not include in its score. His team also keeps in touch with local police and checks potential tenants for criminal backgrounds.

Crime mapping, Clark notes, is not “a save-all product. You have to use it in conjunction with your current risk-management practices.”

Still, knowing the crime history and having a five-year forecast is useful when it comes to choosing a site for an apartment building—or a hotel—and deciding which security features to include in a new building or add to an existing site. At Marriott International, for instance, security executives lean on their CAP Index scores to help them design their new hotels.

“It helps us determine the optimal level of security for each property,” notes Chad Callaghan, vice president of enterprise loss prevention for the Bethesda, Md.-based hotel chain.

Sites deemed “hard targets” are built with controlled access to parking garages and a built-in security office, for example, Callaghan says. Those considered normal security risks are more likely to be open to the public.

Knowing how much crime goes on in the surrounding neighborhood—the CAP Index covers a three-mile radius around the property—alerts local hotel managers to the potential for thefts and assaults on the property, Callaghan adds.

Mid-America's Clark says the maps also signal changes in activity over the past year, a red flag that allows managers to add cameras, invite more police officers to live in the complex or install security gates at entrances.

Those tactics successfully deter crime, says John Morgan, assistant director of the National Institute of Justice, the U.S. Department of Justice's research agency.

“By using crime mapping, it's possible to put law enforcement where they're needed most,” he says, noting that police departments in most major cities use federal databases of incident reports to plot clusters of criminal activity on local maps. “We're now seeing in many cities where they have advanced crime-mapping tools, they have had a decrease in violent crime—even though they have economic problems.”

NIJ's Mapping and Analysis for Public Safety Program allows police to plug in crime locations on a map that indicates where the culprits are likely to strike next. The tool is available for free online at www.icpsr.umich.edu /nacjd/crimestat.html.

Similarly, the FBI publishes a Uniform Crime Report, a collection of crime data from 17,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide. The reports, which reveal crime clusters in states, cities, and counties, are available for free at www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.

Still, Temple University Professor George Rengert says the best way to predict crime within a complex or a high-rise building might be to track the incidents that occur on-site. A study of high-rise dormitories, he notes, revealed that crime tends to cluster around elevators, in public restrooms, and in lobbies—but not just on a single floor. A hallway robbery in one location on one floor could signal the potential for a crime in the same location on another level, a phenomenon he calls “stack crimes.”

Morgan agrees and suggests coupling high-tech surveillance efforts with well-trained human resources on the ground. “Put the technology into the context of the realistic expectations for how your security people are going to work,” Morgan advises. “No matter what kind of command post you have, people get tired. Buying 500 cameras to survey an area is almost worthless because nobody can look at all those different cameras at once.”

–Sharon O'Malley is a freelance writer in College Park, Md.