DICE™ emerged from the development of Risk Terrain Modeling (RTM) for place-based crime analysis.
HISTORY
From the PROLOGUE of the DICE™ eBook: available for free download from Simsi Press: simsi.com/dice-ebook
Rutgers University partnered with Simsi to make DICE™ readily available to communities throughout the United States and around the world.
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The idea for RTM began in 2008 by Dr. Leslie Kennedy and Dr. Joel Caplan at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice (SCJ). This was followed by the first public presentation in early 2009 and the first peer-reviewed publication in the journal Justice Quarterly in 2011. The practical application of RTM analytic outputs was rigorously tested in collaboration with Dr. Eric Piza with a 2012 grant from the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) that funded a 6-city multistate study on RTM for Risk-Based Policing (RBP). Police officers and civilian crime analysts in each jurisdiction that participated were also key collaborators and instrumental to the success of this early research.
Insights from the NIJ study were applied to a Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) initiative led in collaboration with Dr. Paul Boxer to reduce violent gang and gun crimes in Jersey City, NJ. This project was funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) in 2014. It brought multiple municipal and non-governmental community stakeholders together at police headquarters to review results of RTM analytics, as discussed in the 2016 TEDx Talk titled “Focus on Places, Not People, to Prevent Crime.” Lessons learned from the PSN initiative were applied as best-practices in Atlantic City, NJ from 2015-2017. The Atlantic City RBP initiative was spearheaded by the police department (ACPD) and led by then Chief Henry White Jr. and Captain James Sarkos. ACPD established meetings for police officers every two months and meetings for community members on the opposite months to review RTM results and add context to the data and analytics based on their unique professional expertise and lived experiences. The feedback solicited from these multiple sources directly informed intervention strategies with multistakeholder activities at the highest-risk places throughout the city. Some of this work was highlighted by the National Geographic Channel’s TV series Breakthrough (aired in 2017) and later published in the peer-reviewed journal Police Practice & Research (2021). ACPD’s innovative community-based approach to data sharing and multistakeholder crime prevention programming with RTM reignited a longstanding researcher-practitioner partnership with the Kansas City, MO Police Department (KCPD) which dated back to their involvement in the 2012 NIJ study. Led internally by then Sergeant Jonas Baughman, with the mandate and support of Chief Rick Smith, KCPD established a citywide RBP initiative in 2019 aimed at coproduced crime prevention and positive police-community engagements. Their 12-month initiative reduced violent crime by 22% and demonstrated that RBP was sustainable within the department as a ‘new normal’, especially when it involved data-informed partnerships with other city agencies who helped share the burden of crime prevention by doing what they did best at the places needing it most. We realized from these distinct but similar experiences in Jersey City, Atlantic City and Kansas City that the application of RTM for data-informed crime prevention and community engagement did not have to be led solely from within a police agency. RTM could be utilized for public safety programming by another organization as the hub and police could be one of the many other figurative ‘spokes in the wheel’. We were serendipitously afforded the opportunity to test this theory in 2018 on two fronts. First, we began working with Alan Cohen at the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL) in Dallas, TX to utilize RTM to help further the non-profit organization’s goals for safe and healthy environments for children to grow and prosper in the city. The iterative processes for applying RTM to practice that we shared with CPAL in this early work was referred to as data-informed community engagement, or D.I.C.E., and later documented for others to replicate in the eBook Operation Safe Surroundings, made available by the Rutgers Center on Public Security. As work with CPAL was getting underway, the then Rutgers University – Newark Chancellor Nancy Cantor and SCJ Dean Rod Brunson enlisted Drs. Kennedy and Caplan to represent SCJ on the Chancellor’s Anchor Initiative. As part of the Anchor Initiative, they created the Newark Public Safety Collaborative (NPSC) to carry out the established principles and best practices of applied RTM for coproduced public safety via D.I.C.E. In 2022, the BJA reified their early support of applied RTM from the 2014 PSN initiative with new funding to the NPSC as part of their ‘Reimagining Justice’ award opportunity program intended to improve community safety and trust with alternatives to traditional enforcement mechanisms. Over the years, DICE™ has helped communities realize new visions for better public safety with locally relevant place-based analytics that drive meaningful actions with the people most impacted by crime and violence. It’s now an international model for coproduced public safety, with many locally managed replication sites in the United States, Canada, and overseas. |