ArcUser
Spring 2012 Edition
GIS Tutorial for Crime Analysis
This article as a PDF.
GIS Tutorial for Crime Analysis
By Wilpen L. Gorr and Kristen S. Kurland
While the goal of this GIS workbook—to teach crime mapping and analysis skills using ArcGIS 10 software—is narrowly defined, the target audience is broad. Working GIS professionals, as well as people new to GIS and crime analysis, can benefit from the exercises in this book. The authors, Wilpen L. Gorr and Kristen S. Kurland, focus not just on crime mapping but also on creating and maintaining an information system that meets the needs of officers, investigators, and police executives for geoinformation products for management, analysis, public information, and media relations.
The book takes a learning by doing approach. Exercises use real crime data from the Pittsburgh Police Bureau and Allegheny County 911 Center in Pennsylvania that has been altered slightly to protect the privacy of individuals. Although exercises build on each other, each chapter is self-contained, so more advanced users can skip early chapters and move to areas of special interest such as hot spot analysis or making animations. Chapters move from basic GIS skills and the use of finished maps to designing and building those maps, performing crime analysis operations, preparing and managing data and updating maps, and automating processes using ModelBuilder. Each chapter includes Your Turn exercises, which reinforce the concepts and methods taught, and a challenging end of chapter assignment.
The authors have extensive experience teaching GIS to students at a variety of levels ranging from high school to graduate school as well as GIS professionals. Gorr is a professor of public policy and management information systems at the School of Public Policy and Management, H. John Heinz III College, Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches and researches GIS applications. He is also chairman of the school's Master of Science in Public Policy and Management degree program. Kurland is a teaching professor of architecture, information systems, and public policy at the H. John Heinz III College and School of Architecture, Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches GIS, building information modeling, computer-aided drafting, 3D visualization, and infrastructure management.
This book includes a 180-day trial version of ArcGIS 10 for Desktop software and exercise data. An instructor resource DVD is available on request. Esri Press, 2011, 296 pp., ISBN: 978-1589482142
