While everyone in the City is sorry to see Chief Monroe leave for a new challenge in Charlotte, his legacy of using new police tactics to slash crime rates will remain in our City and has garnered attention in a recent publication. 
 
In the Tech Talk section of Governing.com, the Richmond Police Department is lauded for merging the latest technology with good old-fashioned police work:

The plummeting crime rate appears to be due in part to aggressive police work that includes sophisticated computing and analytics that help the department predict where crimes will happen.

Officers amass the usual information from emergency calls and police reports but also compile information about paydays, weather, demographics, sporting events and traffic. Then they look for patterns. For instance, they could see that robbers were hitting hard in Hispanic neighborhoods on payday.
 
Police work always has been about connecting the dots. The connections were hard to see when the dots were on paper, but Richmond now has them on a digital map. Officers plug in addresses where crimes have occurred and plot points electronically, "geo-coding" to allow visual information to produce "aha" moments where patterns emerge.

Because these predictive analytics allow Richmond police to anticipate when and where certain types of crimes occur, commanders move officers around to the city's advantage. Since using the technology, the city has seen major crime drop around 20 percent a year.
 
We are encouraged and proud that Richmond now boasts a Police Department as a national model for others to follow.