Hotsketch: Drawing police patrol routes among spatiotemporal crime hotspots

Abstract

During the course of a day, a police unit is expected to move throughout the city to provide a visible presence and respond quickly to emergencies. Planning this movement at the beginning of the shift can provide a helpful first step in ensuring that officers are present in areas of high crime, but these plans can quickly break down as they are pulled away to 911 calls. Once such an initial plan is deferred, police units need to be able to rapidly and fluidly decide where to go next depending on their immediate location and time. In this paper, we present our research to couple spatiotemporal analysis of historical crime data with sketch-based interaction methods. This research is presented through an initial prototype, HotSketch, which we describe through a set of use cases within the domain of police patrol route planning.