Title
Crime and Homelessness, Is There a Connection?

Author Information
Elaine Carlton
American River College, Geography 350: Data Acquisition in GIS; Fall 2017
elainejcarlton@gmail.com

Abstract
Homelessness is a constant topic of interest for residents and government officials alike, and monitoring and controlling the homeless population often falls on the shoulders of Law Enforcement. At one time, budget cuts affected Cities abilities to purchase technology to collect data on this versatile group of people, but now more and more agencies are turning to apps to get the job done. The data is still not readily available to the public on agencies open data portals, but with compliance of President Obama’s 21st Century Policing Report, that should soon change.

Introduction
Throughout the United States there is a growing epidemic of homelessness. It affects millions of Americans on a daily basis, whether they themselves are homeless or not. Consider when you exit a freeway. Often a person is seen standing at the intersection, holding a sign asking for food or money, “any little bit helps”. Some of these people are genuinely desperate for help, while others have made it a lifestyle. As young children we are taught the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover”. The same applies for homelessness. Until you walk a mile in their shoes, you cannot understand what hardships they have, or are going through. Though as you sit at that intersection watching them, you judge, for better or for worse.

Unfortunately, in today’s world people are quick to assume that all homeless people are criminals. Due to the transient nature of the homeless population it is difficult for law enforcement agencies to quantify the relationship between crime and the homeless population. Many agencies are still recovering from the recession and budget cuts that affected their staffing levels and resources, including technological advancements. These limitations have influenced the abilities of agencies to not only assist the homeless population with housing, rehabilitation, and counseling, but also document and track the locations of homeless camps.

It is the goal of law enforcement to protect and serve their communities to the best of their abilities. Doing so involves determining where crime is occurring and what the cause and effect behind it is. By documenting the locations of homeless camps it would be much easier to determine if there is a correlation between camp locations and crime. For example, if there are several homeless camps located behind a WalMart shopping center where a large number of vehicle burglaries occur, one would assume it is the transients breaking into the vehicles to steal loose change and any valuable items they can carry away. But, once those camps are cleaned up, essentially removing the “criminal element”, it can be assumed the vehicle burglaries would stop. Until there is enough data collected to conduct a thorough analysis of the movement of homeless camps and any pattern of crime around them, this is just another challenge faced by law enforcement today.

Background
With the continual advancement of technology, specifically with mapping, it is becoming possible for city governments to include all of their departments in the data collection process of tracking the homeless, to include Parks and Recreation, Public Works, Police Department and Code Enforcement. There are several apps provided by Esri to complete this process, including Survey 123 and the Collector App, in addition to several other companies that are recognizing the need for data collection. To that point, the City of Redlands and the City of Rancho Cucamonga have both begun using Survey 123 and Collector to track their homeless population (Esri, 2017, Helping the Homeless with GIS), while the City of West Sacramento has partnered with Appledore, a start-up company based out of San Francisco, to begin mapping and monitoring their homeless population (Young, 2017, West Sacramento Maps Out Homeless Population).

During President Obama’s term the 21st Century Policing Report was written and enacted, directing all law enforcement agencies across the United States to increase their transparency with the public. Part of this transparency is to share data, policies and procedures on department and city websites or through open data portals. While many smaller agencies are still working toward achieving this level of transparency, there are several larger agencies that already were, or have been able to, comply with this directive and have their data available to the public.

Methods
The Sacramento Police Department is one agency that has both their dispatch calls for service and crime data available on the City's website. Through multiple channels on this website, I was able to download shapefiles containing dispatch calls for service for 2015, 2016 and year to date 2017 (through November 08, 2017). The crime data, which is based on reports written by officers, was also available but was not provided as a shapefile due to the lack of geo-referencing (there were no addresses or x,y coordinates listed with the data). Without any physical location attached to the crime data I wouldn’t be able to analyze any patterns or trends based on a geographic location, therefore I only focused on the dispatch calls for service data for this study.

The remaining layers that I obtained for Sacramento were obtained through the City of Sacramento’s Open Data Portal, the County of Sacramento’s GIS data portal or through the United States Census Bureau. The following layers are ones that I imported but did not necessarily use as part of the analysis once I determined the scope of the study: Census County Boundary at 500,000 feet, Census Block, Sacramento City Boundary, Hydrology, Light Rail and Light Rail Stations, Parks, and Schools, Parcels, Sacramento County Highways and Sacramento County Centerlines.

Results

Year	Total CFS	500ft Total CFS	% of Total
2015	336,576	6,587	1.9%
2016	332,513	6,542	1.9%
2017*	281,982	6,126	2.1%

*2017 YTD = Jan 01 - Nov 08

The dispatch call for service datasets were extremely large and contained an average of approximately 317,000 records per year. In order to manage this data and make it more meaningful to my analysis, I selected only those calls for service that occurred within 500 feet of a river feature (from the Sacramento hydrology shapefile). This narrowed my datasets to an average of approximately 6,500 records per year, or 2% of the total dataset.


When I displayed the three years of data on the map I noticed there weren’t any areas that appeared to be an anomaly for any specific year and that most of the data points were overlapping. The three years of data was still overwhelming as I began to look at it so I narrowed my scope to only those calls for service for 2017 in order to achieve a more reasonable data set to work with.


In order to glean anything meaningful from the data, given the challenges I continued to run into, I turned my focus of the 2017 calls for service to the area of Discovery Park, where the American River meets the Sacramento River. Based on personal observation and from the large groupings of calls for service on the above 2017 map, this is an area known for transients and homeless camps.


Out of the 1,325 calls for service in the selected area around Discovery Park, 7% resulted in a report being taken (this is based on the Report=Y code entered by Dispatch, the number of actual reports could be higher). Of those reports taken (see below chart), it appears the top eight would be the most related to homelessness based on the nature of the call. For example, most “Suspicious Subject/Circumstance-In Progress” calls refer to individuals who are seen by the public doing something that appears to be criminal in nature. “Drunk Subject” refers to people who are drunk in public, causing a disturbance to the general population and “Subject Stop” is when an Officer stops a subject seen walking on the street that, again, appears to be involved in some type of criminal activity.

Call For Service Description	# Reports
Suspicious Subject/Circumstance-In Progress	13
Drunk Subject	9
Subject Stop	9
Welfare Check	9
Report Number Assignment	7
Misdemeanor Assault-In Progress	5
Stolen Vehicle-Report	5
Disturbance-Clarify	4
Traffic Stop	3
Vehicle Accident-Injuries	3
Alarm-Crime Occd	2
Felony Assault-In Progress	2
Petty Theft-In Progress	2
Reckless/Hazardous Driver	2
Suspicious Activity-Report	2
Suspicious Subject/Circumstance-Weapon Involved	2
Vehicle Accident-No or Unknown Injuries	2
Arson	2
Burglary-Report	1
Business Check	1
Dead Body	1
Drunk Driver	1
Felony Assault-In Progress	1
Felony Battery-Report-No Weapons	1
Found Property	1
Medical Aid	1
Petty Theft-Report	1
Robbery-Less Than 15 Ago	1
Shots Fired-Less Thank 15 Ago	1
Suspicious Vehicle-Occupied	1
Transportation	1
Total	96

Analysis
Aside from any study available, it is apparent as you drive around town that water features attract homeless camps due to the multiple resources they provide. High brush or trees offer shelter and cover from both weather-related elements and public view, water is used for cleaning, bathing or drinking, and accessibility to public restrooms and other amenities create an even more enticing environment.

The major challenge I faced with this analysis was not having access to all of the data that is collected by a dispatcher or knowing what the outcome of the call was after an officer responded. Many calls for service are dispatched under one call description but can later escalate or deescalate to another which means the original call type might not be correct. It was also a challenge not knowing how the Sacramento dispatchers categorize calls for service related to homelessness because there did not appear to be a specific call description for this.

After displaying only 2017’s data on the map I realized there were still too many records to observe any type of trend or pattern in call for service rates. When I zoomed in to a map scale of 1:15,000 or closer I began to see clusters of calls for service in areas that appeared to be populated with businesses. This brought me back to my original problem of not having enough data for each call for service to determine if the incidents were homeless related or not.

Conclusion
Despite the transparency in data sharing by the Sacramento Police Department, there is not enough information in the datasets to conduct a thorough and comprehensive analysis of the correlation between homelessness and crime. Part of this is due to policies within the Police Department that only requires limited information be released to the public, while the other part is due to the difficulty in accurately tracking and recording incidents involving homeless individuals.

In an effort to provide a central housing location that offers various resources to the homeless, the City of Sacramento has opened a temporary homeless shelter that can accommodate up to 200 people. This is a concern to many residents in the surrounding neighborhoods because they feel their houses, vehicles and property are now targets for the homeless to break into (Oliver, 2017, Sacramento Opens New Temporary Homeless Shelter ). With the opening of this shelter near a neighborhood that didn’t previously have crime, there is now a baseline to compare against to see if there is a connection between homelessness and crime. This would be a good study to follow up with a year from now to see if crime rates increased after the introduction of the shelter and homeless to the area.

References
Brandenberger, Mary, 2015. Department of Justice Announces New Guidebook on 21st Century Policing, www.cops.usdoj.gov.

City of Sacramento, 2013-2017, Dispatch and Crime Report Data Extracts, www.cityofsacramento.org.

City of Sacramento, 2013-2017, City of Sacramento Transparency, www.cityofsacramento.org.

Esri, 2017, Helping the Homeless with GIS, www.esri.com.

Oliver, Kevin, 2017, Sacramento Opens New Temporary Homeless Shelter, www.kcra.com.

Sacramento County, 2017, Sacramento County GIS Data Library, www.sacgis.org.

United States Census Bureau, 2017, Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles - Counties, www.census.gov.

Young, Allen, 2017. West Sacramento Maps Out Homeless Population, www.comstocksmag.com.