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S&CC-IRG Proposal Track 2: Real-time algorithms and software systems for

heterogeneous data driven policing of social harm


Overview. Communities are adversely affected by heterogeneous social harm events, e.g. crime, traffic
crashes, medical emergencies, drug use, and police, fire, health and social service departments are tasked
with mitigating social harm through various types of interventions. Methods for collection, analysis and
modeling of heterogeneous social harm data to identify government actions to improve quality of life are
needed. While social harm indexes have been proposed for allocating resources to spatially fixed hotspots,
the risk of social harm events is dynamic over daily, weekly and monthly scales and new software systems
capable of quickly identifying risks and triggering appropriate public safety responses are needed. At the same
time, government action, for example unnecessary traffic stops, may be an additional form of social harm
and thus the legal and ethical consequences of government interventions must be measured to understand
communities attitudes towards these actions.
We propose a three year program of research that aims to make significant progress on how heterogeneous
social harm data is modeled in a unified framework, how software systems can be designed to match law
enforcement resources with dynamic social harm risk in near real time, and how success of heterogeneous
intervention activities can be measured along with public trust and grievances towards predictive policing.
The project will be split into three phases. In Phase 1, we will develop a unified spatio-temporal modeling
framework for social harm with a focus on i) crime, ii) traffic accidents, iii) Emergency Medical Serivces
(EMS) calls for service, and iv) measurement of community trust and grievances towards law enforcement.
In particular, marked spatio-temporal point processes will be developed for handling periodic and seasonal
trends, second order effects due to repeat victimization, and exogenous event rate fluctuations. In Phase
2, we will integrate models of social harm into software control systems for near real-time policing of het-
erogenous social harm events. These systems will be designed to automate dynamic optimization of police
resources from data ingestion and processing, risk modeling, hourly resource allocation, and impact measure-
ment for feedback into the system, while keeping in mind the end-user constraints defined by police officers
in the field. In Phase 3, we will conduct a randomized controlled trial of heterogeneous data driven policing
in Indianapolis in collaboration with the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department (IMPD), Indianapolis
EMS, Indianapolis Mayor’s Office, National Alliance of Mental Illness, Marion County Prosecutor’s Office,
and the Indy Public Safety Foundation. In the trial, we will investigate the extent to which police in partner-
ship with community stakeholders can respond to dynamic, heterogeneous social harm hotspots and we will
measure the impact across the four types of social harm: crime, traffic, EMS calls for service, and community
trust in police.
Intellectual Merit. Social harm data resides with a disconnected set of community databases and current
methodologies for modeling social harm neglect space-time dynamics altogether or focus on a small related
subset of event types. Furthermore, interventions are designated in spatial locations for several weeks or
months at a time, failing to account for the daily changes in risk of social harm events where crime, traffic
crashes, and medical emergencies cluster in different times and locations in communities. This research
is novel in that i) software systems for heterogeneous social harm data integration will be developed ii)
new marked point processes will be constructed for modeling heterogeneous social harm event dynamics
including trust and grievances towards police iii) optimal control methods will be developed for space-time
point processes that are lacking in current point process research, and iv) near real time software-human
systems for deploying hourly interventions to dynamically changing risk will be implemented and tested
in a large randomized controlled field trial. Broader Impacts. The project has a significant community
engagement component and software developed through the research will be used by IMPD, EMS, NAMI,
the prosecutor’s office, and individual citizens for sharing of social harm analytics and collaboration in social
harm intervention. The methods developed in the project will also be applicable beyond policing in smart
and connected communities more generally and could be used for data analytics integration and allocation
of resources across government departments. Graduate students will be trained in interdisciplinary research
methods cutting across criminal justice, statistics, and computer science. Research interest in the domain of
algorithms for heterogeneous data in smart cities will be encouraged through a workshop hosted by the PIs
at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

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Project description

1 Introduction
1.1 Motivation
Crime is highly concentrated in urban communities and hotspot or “predictive” policing efforts aim to apply
limited resources to high intensity geographic areas and time intervals to disrupt crime opportunities, leading
to aggregate crime rate reductions [9, 52, 59, 73]. However, police serve other roles in the community beyond
crime response and prevention, including traffic enforcement, EMS response, and more generally dealing
with events related to social harm [58]. At the same time, the activities police departments employ to
address social harm issues in a community (directed patrol, speed traps, community outreach, etc.) have
both the potential to decrease the risk of social harm, but may also increase the risk or perception of social
harm if the community costs of police activities such as stop-and-frisk reduce trust and increase grievances
among disenfranchised groups [58]. Other community stakeholders such as EMS responders, social services,
the mayor’s office, city prosecutor, and individual citizens also participate to reduce social harm. While
collaboration can take place, for example a paramedic riding along on police patrols [40] in high drug
overdose hotspots, often data is distributed among several agencies, data analyses are not shared across
agencies, and interventions are not coordinated.
Despite these multiple and disparate daily challenges, existing hotspot and predictive policing algorithms
and intervention strategies focus on single or groups of related sub-categories of social harm events. New
software and analytics methods are needed to facilitate heterogenous data sharing across the various agen-
cies tasked with addressing social harm and to support real-time data driven policing of social harm in
collaboration with community stakeholders.
In Figure 1, we provide a mock-up of the integrative policing system we envision, called Community
Data Analytics for Social Harm (CDASH). Algorithms will combine historical and real-time data across
heterogeneous types of social harm data pulled from police, EMS (Emergency Medical Services), and social
services databases, along with community feedback (tips and complaints), to prioritize daily activities within
each patrol beat in the city. For example, a traffic accident hotspot may be flagged at 7am for police
intervention and the patrol unit is given a push notification to monitor traffic there when not on a call to
service. A community watch group utilizing the application is tasked with providing soft patrols [4] during
9am-4:30pm in their neighborhood that is flagged as a high residential burglary risk. Later at night, a
patrol officer is paired with a paramedic [40] in a drug overdose hotspot and positioned to shorten EMS
response time. Over longer timescales, beats that receive a higher volume of complaints against officers or
are estimated to have higher rates of under-reporting may be flagged for a community meeting to be held in
that neighborhood.
We are proposing a three year research program that aims to make significant progress on integrated
data analytics for social harm across heterogeneous datasets and community stakeholders. The project will
be split into three phases. In Phase 1, we will develop a unified spatio-temporal modeling framework for
social harm with a focus on i) crime, ii) traffic accidents, iii) EMS calls for service, and iv) measurement
of community trust and grievances towards law enforcement. In Phase 2, software control systems will
be designed to automate dynamic optimization of police resources from data ingestion and processing, risk
modeling, hourly resource allocation, and impact measurement for feedback into the system. In Phase 3,
we will conduct a randomized controlled trial of heterogeneous data driven policing to investigate the extent
to which police, in collaboration with Indianapolis EMS, NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Health), and
the prosecutors and mayor’s offices, can respond to dynamic, heterogeneous social harm hotspots. We will
measure the impact across the four types of social harm: crime, traffic, EMS calls for service, and trust.

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police database

crime =ps event


point process task
pre-process &
model alloca=on
trust
service service
service
EMS database

social services

7am-8:30am 9am-4:30pm 10pm-2am


feedback
2min

1min

traffic policing ci=zen soC patrol police + paramedic

Figure 1: CDASH software system for dynamically changing social harm risk and intervention. Heterogeneous event
data from multiple sources is pre-processed through a trust weighting service and then input into a point process
service that estimates risk of social harm in space and time across event categories. Tasks are assigned to community
stakeholders based upon time of day, location, event type, and community stakeholder role. Example tasks: rush-
hour policing intervention at traffic accident hotspot (left), mid-day citizen soft patrol of residential burglary in their
neighborhood (center), positioning officer with paramedic riding along to reduce response time to drug overdose calls
for service (right).

1.2 Community engagement


The proposed project is a close collaboration between the PIs at IUPUI and IMPD. The culmination of
the project will be a software application that integrates heterogeneous data from IMPD, Indianapolis
Emergency Medical Services (EMS), National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the prosecutor’s office
and Indianapolis citizens and then synthesizes the data for analytics sharing and data driven tasks for the
community stake holders. A randomized controlled field trial will be conducted to measure the impact of
the prototype software system when used for connecting community groups for dynamic intervention of
heterogeneous social harm in patrol beats for a 6 month period of time.
Within the trial, IMPD patrol officers will make dedicated patrols in social harm hotspots aimed at
property crime, traffic accidents, EMS calls to service and trust. IMPD is developing a formal unit called
the Mobile Crisis Unit wherein an EMS paramedic will be assigned to a patrol with an officer for responding
to calls for service related to drug overdoses. These units are a natural test bed for the CDASH system
in terms of integrating data analytics between IMPD and EMS and measuring the impact of data driven
collaborations. Another community component of the project will be the use of soft patrols [4] wherein
IMPD may leverage citizens to provide a “police” presence, which may be achieved through neighborhood
watch programs and citizen volunteers for patrolling. Finally, a version of the CDASH application will be
made available to the general public to provide information on social harm trends in city neighborhoods.
There will also be a community engagement component aimed at measuring and improving trust in

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predictive policing and policing in general. A public pre/post survey will be conducted in the treatment and
control areas for assessing public perception, trust in police, and fear of crime and social harm during the
trial. Furthermore, a subset of dynamic policing activities will include soft policing conducted by community
members aimed at both reducing social harm and improving public trust in treatment experimental units.

1.3 Integrative research


We have assembled a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to undertake the proposed research. George
Mohler is an associate professor of computer science and is an expert on computational statistics and spatial-
temporal point process modeling with applications to crime and security. Mohler has experience building
algorithms and software for predictive policing and has conducted randomized controlled trials of predictive
policing in Los Angeles and Kent (UK). Jeremy Carter is an assistant professor of criminal justice with
research expertise in intelligence-led policing, police operations, and organizational technology adoption. His
research has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security to
support police operations projects across the United States. Carter has also served as chair of the Standing
Scientific Review Panel for the U.S. Department of Justice. Rajeev Raje is a professor of computer science
at IUPUI. Raje’s expertise is designing distributed software systems. His current efforts have focused on the
trust of individual software services and distributed systems made out of them. He will lead the efforts on
designing and developing necessary abstractions and associated smart services and their compositions using
the principles of trusted services.

1.4 Research capacity building


Through a partnership between IUPUI SPEA and Science schools, along with the Information and Intelli-
gence Center at the IMPD, Indianapolis EMS, NAMI, and the mayor’s and prosecutor’s office, the proposed
project will build research capacity across data driven policing of social harm, measurement and modeling
of community trust in predictive policing, and software systems for dynamic optimization of heterogeneous
tasks in smart and connected communities. Graduate students participating in the project will have an
opportunity to serve on an interdisciplinary team of social and computer scientists. They will gain valuable
exposure to research practices in designing field experiments of software control systems in smart cities that
would only be possible through this type of interdisciplinary collaboration. The PI also anticipates funding
for a REU on Data Science, Risk and Human Activity and summer projects on algorithms for social harm
would be a natural fit in the program.
The project will also build research capacity through a workshop in the year three of the project aimed at
bringing researchers from the social, computational, and mathematical sciences and government stakeholders
together to exchange ideas related to the theme modeling heterogeneous event data for smart cities. The
workshop will spark greater interest in modeling and software frameworks that more holistically address event
patterns and control strategies in smart and connected communities. Graduate students and post-docs will
be encouraged to attend through travel funding support.

1.5 Intellectual merit


Current methodologies for modeling social harm neglect space-time dynamics altogether or focus on a small
related subset of event types. Furthermore, interventions are designated in spatial locations for several weeks
or months at a time, failing to account for the daily changes in risk of social harm events where crime, traffic
crashes, and medical emergencies cluster in different times and locations in communities. Furthermore, social
harm data resides in multiple, disconnected city databases and analytics and intervention tasks are often
not coordinated across community stakeholders.
This research is novel in that i) software systems for heterogeneous social harm data integration will be
developed ii) new marked point processes will be constructed for modeling heterogeneous social harm event
dynamics including trust and grievances towards police iii) optimal control methods will be developed for

3
space-time point processes that are lacking in current point process research, and iv) near real time software-
human systems for deploying hourly interventions to dynamically changing risk will be implemented and
tested in a large field trial.

1.6 Broader impact


The project has a significant community engagement component and software developed through the research
will be used by the IMPD, EMS, NAMI, the prosecutor’s office, and individual citizens in a trial to reduce
social harm in the Indianapolis community. The methods developed in the project will also be applicable
beyond policing in smart and connected communities more generally and could be used to allocate resources
across government departments. Graduate students will be trained in interdisciplinary research methods
cutting across criminal justice, statistics, and computer science. Research interest in the domain of algorithms
for heterogeneous data in smart cities will be encouraged through a workshop hosted by the PIs at Indiana
University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI).

2 Research plan
2.1 Phase 1: Point process models of social harm
In the initial phase of the project statistical models will be developed for heterogeneous social harm event
data. The IMPD and Indianapolis EMS have provided several years of incident level data on: part 1 and part
2 crime (UCR and calls for service), traffic accident calls for service, EMS calls for service, and community
complaints against officers.
A number of algorithmic methods have been proposed for estimating crime hotspot risk including mul-
tivariate models [39, 46, 46, 71, 71], kernel density estimation [7, 19, 27, 36, 37] and spatio-temporal point
processes [49, 53]. While each approach has tradeoffs, marked point processes have the advantage that long-
term intrinsic risk [49], short-term dynamic risk [53], and periodic/seasonal trends [57] in the intensity can
be handled systematically with only event data as input. In [52], we conducted a randomized controlled
trial of point process based predictive policing (see Figure 2). A point process model was trained each night
to rank 150m x 150m hotspots according to the risk of property crime for each 8 hour shift the following
day. A dedicated crime analyst made a similar set of predictions, identical in appearance accept for their
location so as to make the experiment single blinded (from the patrol officers perspective). Experimental
days were randomized so that on treatment days officers patrolled point process hotspots and on control days
officers patrolled analyst designated hotspots. Crime reductions in point process determined hotspots were
statistically significant and corresponded to a 7% crime rate reduction at mean patrol levels of 30 minutes
per hotspot per day [52] (see Table 1).

µFoothill µN. Hollywood µSouthwest βk SE

Combined conditions 6.59 *** 9.36 *** 8.98 *** −7.54 · 10−4 * 0.000326182
−4
Treatment (ETAS) 6.79 *** 9.35 *** 9.12 *** −9.78 · 10 * 0.000427327
−4
Control (analyst) 6.60 *** 9.2 *** 8.79 *** −4.66 · 10 0.000513346

Table 1: Parameter estimates for multiple regression of crime rate against patrol time during
different experimental conditions. µj is the estimated mean crime rate per day in each division, βk
is the estimated average change in crime volume per minute of patrol time under different experimental
conditions k. Standard errors are for estimated βk . * P < 0.05 and *** P < 0.001 levels.

The Los Angeles predictive policing experiment had two major limitations: 1) only a limited set of
property crimes were used to allocate patrols and 2) only police patrol was used for intervention and, due

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Crime report

Police RMS User  


(database)

Predictions delivered
via internet login
Secure  Cloud  Hos>ng  
Secure automated
data transfer

  ETAS   Hotspot  
Geocode   Algorithm   Ranking  

Database  

Figure 2: Architecture of software system tested in the Los Angeles point process based predictive policing experi-
ment.

to resource constraints, hotspots only received 30 minutes of patrol per day (on average). Our goal is to
extend this framework across heterogeneous social harm event types and also across multiple community
stakeholders to expand both the types of harm addressed and the tasks aimed at reducing social harm.
Social harm indices have recently been proposed [58, 68], as they account for the diversity of policing
tasks that traditional crime hotspots fail to capture. However, static social harm indices that are fixed for
several weeks or months do not account for intraweek and intraday fluctations that exist in social harm event
patterns. For example, in Figure 3 we plot intraweek and intraday variation patterns in Indianapolis during
2015. Robbery and vehicle theft are greater in volume on the weekends compared to burglary, whereas
traffic accidents peak on Friday. Within the day, traffic accidents spike during rush hour in the morning and
evening, whereas EMS calls for service are larger in the evening and at night. Further variation will likely
exist when these events are disaggregated by patrol beat and additionally temporary hotspots that last for
several weeks may exist for certain beat-event type combinations. We propose constructing novel marked
point process models that capture the variation in risk across month of the year, day of the week, hour of
the day, beat and event type.

A point process algorithm for social harm

The point process models of crime used in our past research have several drawbacks that we will address
in the project. The spatial temporal point processes in [49, 52] fail to take into account hourly, weekly and
seasonal effects in the data and also do not utilize spatial covariates that may help predict risk above and
beyond event data used as a sole input [39]. We propose a marked point process of the form,
  X
T
λ(m, x, t) = µm (h(t), d(t), s(t)) exp θm c(x) + gM (i) (t − ti , x − xi ), (1)
t>ti

Here the conditional intensity, λ(m, x, t), models the rate of events of social harm category m at location x
and point in time t. The intensity consists of a background Poisson process, µm , and a kernel gM (i) capturing

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1.0 1.00

normalized call to service count


normalized crime count

0.75
0.9

0.50
0.8

0.25
0.7

Sun Mon Tues Wed Thurs Fri Sat 0 5 10 15 20 25


hour of day
BURGLARY ROBBERY TRAFFIC VEHICLE THEFT ACCIDENT/PD DISTURBANCE DOMESTIC EMS

Figure 3: Intraweek crime report volume (left) and intraday call to service volume (right) for various social harm
events in Indianapolis during 2015.

self and cross excitation between events of different categories. Self-exciting point processes traditionally use
Kernel Density Estimation to determine a stationary background rate. Here we allow for covariates in space
and time, in particular the hour of the day h(t), day of the week d(t), seasonality (month of the year) s(t)
and spatial covariates c(x) incorporated through a log-linear model as is done in [5]. These covariates may
include census data, leading indicator variables, and feedback inputs from the CDASH system. Equation
1 may be estimated using an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm [49] that decouples estimation at
each iteration into two Poisson estimation problems. For example, pseudo-likelihood estimation [5] may be
employed for estimating θm at each EM iteration.
The point process model of social harm in Equation 1 will then be used in subsequent phases of the
project to rank social harm risk within each patrol beat and each hour time interval. The ranking will be
used to select appropriate policing activities for that hour. Additionally, the estimated intensity of social
harm will be used to define microscale hotspots where officers, community groups, and individual citizens
can focus efforts.

Dynamic resource allocation algorithm

In Phase 1, of the project we will also develop a framework within CDASH for dynamic resource allocation
of heterogeneous police activities. Consider an estimated point process intensity λ(m, x, t) specifying the rate
of events at spatial location x at time t for event category m. A software system is needed for allocating the
space-time density of policing resources ρ(x, t) that optimizes a cost function reflecting desired reductions in
crime, traffic, complaints, and call response times. In [75], an optimal control problem is solved for dynamic
allocation of police resources to crime hotspots arising from reaction-diffusion systems. Here we propose a
modified, point process optimal control problem as in Equation 1. The first term in Equation 1 reflects the
total reduced social harm event rate where β is a police deterrence parameter that can be estimated from
historical predictive policing experimental data [52]. The marks m index social harm event types including
crime, traffic crashes, EMS calls for service, and occurrences of trust (crime tips) or grievance (complaints
against officers). The second term models the expected cost of call for service response time corresponding
to a given resource allocation (where k · k could denote Euclidean, Manhattan, or travel time distance).
XM Z Z
−βρ(x,t)
argmin ω(m) e λ(m, x, t)dxdt + α(m) ρ(x, t)kx − x0 kλ(m, x0 , t)dxdx0 dt. (2)
ρ(x,t) m=1

The weights ω(m) and α(m) determine the subjective priorities across social harm event types for a police

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agency. One possible approach to weighting selection is to use sentencing tariffs as outlined in [68].
A software system then is needed that can estimate a discretized approximation of the intensity λ(m, x, t)
from input data and output the optimal policing strategy ρ(x, t) and relay that information to each officer
at the beginning of their shift through a UI or push notification system. The system secondly needs to
continuously pull social harm incident reports and officer location data for feedback into the system. We
envision a cloud-based web application similar to the one used in [52] that would fulfill these tasks through
a Java datapipe connecting to the Police RMS and nightly cronjobs solving the optimization problems using
historical and recent data. The central unit of abstraction in the system will be similar to that of collaboration
events with many attributes (e.g., participants including law enforcement and community members, time,
location, and activities).

Evaluation of point process models

We will apply inference strategies developed in Phase 1 historical crime, traffic, EMS and complaint
data. Evaluation will proceed by first testing the ability of the methodology to recover known parameter
distributions from synthetically generated data as we have done in [50, 53]. Secondly, we will use cross
validation to test the methodology on the IMPD data set. In particular, we will evaluate the point process
framework against static social index hotspot methods [58, 68] using a moving window approach where
training occurs using data up to day t and then prediction and testing occurs on day t + 1, where t moves
across the dataset. We will use standard point process metrics such as the AIC and BIC [56] for model
comparison, as well as residual analysis [50, 66, 70] to assess the goodness of fit.

2.2 Phase 2: Software Realization of CDASH


Figure 1 indicates the overview of the CDASH. It will be realized as a distributed system using the principles
of service-oriented architecture (SOA) [26]. As seen in the figure, CDASH will be designed as a composition
of four types of services: a) input service, ii) trust prediction service, iii) point process-based service, and
iv) output service. Many different instances of these services will be created as needed.
• Input Service (IPS): The IPS will be used to collect different categories of inputs from all the stake-
holders of the system. These stakeholders include Government (e.g., Mayor’s office), Community (e.g.,
10-point coalition), law enforcement (e.g., IMPD), and First Responders (e.g., EMTs). Each of these
stakeholders will provide appropriate category of input to the system – e.g., law enforcement data could
be in form of historical data related to various incidences of social harm, while data from community
could be real-time in nature. The IPS will be customized to allow input via mobile devices (e.g., cell
phones) as well. Also, various instance of IPS will be created for different categories of stakeholders.
• Trust Prediction Service (TPS): Not only the nature of the input from each stakeholder is different
but also the associated trust about these inputs will also be variable. Certain inputs (e.g., historical
data) will have a high trust value associated, while unknown crime-related tips may need to be assessed
for their trustworthiness. The TPS will be responsible for carrying out this task. There are various
approaches for data-based and agent-based trust management (e.g., [20, 45]) in specific domains such
as the networked vehicular systems, but these do not consider the trust of software services and
their data in distributed systems. The assessment of trust associated with each input will be based
on our recent work [28–32] about quantification of trust in software-based distributed systems and
associated merging. This quantification is based on the principles of Subjective Logic [38] and theory
of evidence [67]. In these previous efforts, we represented the trust of a software service as a tuple
of Belief, Disbelief, and Uncertainty (b, d, u) following the Subjective Logic approach. That same
principle will be used in this proposed research – each input data and its source will be associated with
evidences and validity of these evidences (as a result of the feedback loop) will be used to adjust the (b,
d, u) values associated with the trust of the data and the source of that data. We have experimented
various models (e.g., optimistic, average and pessimistic) with different starting values for the (b, d,
u) tuples in [60]. These alternatives, along with various operators provided by the Subjective Logic

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(e.g., consensus) to merge various (b, d, u) tuples will be used by the TPS to provide these tuples to
the Point Process-based Service.
• Point Process-based Service (PPS): The PPS will take as input event data (type, location, date, and
time) and output a recommended event type and hotspot location of focus to an end user based upon
their location, the time and their role (e.g. police, EMS responder, citizen). A cronjob will run once a
day that performs maximum likelihood estimation of the model using historical event data up through
present. The city will be divided into a grid and the estimated model will be used to score the risk of
each event type the following day in each grid cell and each hour time interval. For example, an officer
may be assigned an activity in a given beat and hour interval as follows. The intensity of each event
type is first weighted by the event type priority in each grid cell of the officers beat for that hour. The
highest priority-weighted grid cell is then selected for directed patrol and information relevant to the
event risk in that cell is communicated through the application to the officer.
• Output Service (OPS): The OPS will be responsible for displaying the recommendations of the PPS
to various participants of the system. It will provide a graphics interface to display these details which
also will be customized to mobile devices. Each stakeholder will also provide his/her feedback about
these recommendations -– e.g., was the input provided by a particular participant trustworthy and did
it help in better prediction? These feedbacks will be fed back to the TPS module as indicated above.

Formalism

In addition to the (b, d, u)-based model to quantify and represent the trust of data and its sender, we
will also define a basic abstraction called collaboration for designing CDASH. The collaboration is formally
defined as a tuple of {n, t, ts, p, i, o, d}, where:
• n indicates the name of the collaboration – e.g., Community Collaboration.
• t indicates the type of collaboration – e.g., One-to-One Collaboration.
• ts indicates the trust-worthiness of the collaboration, a value quantified using the (b, d, u) model –
e.g., (0.8, 0.1, 0.1) for a trusted collaboration.
• p indicates the participants in the collaboration – e.g., Community and Law Enforcement.
• i indicates the inputs associated with the collaboration – e.g., a location name and its coordinates for
a particular event of social harm.
• o indicates the outputs associated with the collaboration – e.g., a recommendation in form of a police
dispatch.
• d indicates the duration of the collaboration. Some collaborations will be short-lived (e.g., an input
tip), while others may have a never-ending lifespan (e.g., continuous community forums for providing
inputs to CDASH).
During the design of CDASH, we will use this abstraction and formalism to define various types of
collaborations, their inter-dependencies and assess their usefulness.

Software Development and Dissemination Process

CDASH will be designed and developed in close collaboration with different partners (e.g., IMPD) in order
to provide services to the various stakeholders. We will use the Agile software development methodology [48]
and the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) [3] framework to help facilitate the collaboration of the stakeholders
in development of the system. The use of the Agile software development methodology will allow the evolution
of the CDASH in a collaborative manner through the use of project iterations and defined checkpoints
in which thoughtful evaluation can be conducted by the users. This process will be achieved through
the application of the DAD framework to simplify the overall iterative process of agile development. As
part of the design and development of the software realization of CDASH, we will use standard source
code management practices in order to maintain our software packages. These practices include: frequent
code maintenance, code versioning (e.g., branching and merging), updating associated documentation, and

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providing user support. We will use publicly available software tools in order to help facilitate the creation
of both documentation as well as source code generation. Upon completion we will work with our partners
(who will also be earlier adopters of the CDASH) in order to carry our trial runs and gather feedback from
them.
A publicly-available project website – home page for the project – (http://CDASH.cs.iupui.edu) will be
maintained at IUPUI. All the software code, documentation, research outcomes will be available on this home
page. In addition, through the use of the GitHub [1], an online web-based Git [2] repository system (hosted
at the Indiana University), the deployment of the CDASH will take place through end-user downloads of the
source and executable code. A release stable version of the software will be made available via a hyperlink on
the GitHub project home page [47] and the project home page. Along with this software will be a user manual
that will provide a step-by-step guide to install and customize the software. As all of the documentation and
source code will be residing on publicly accessible locations, the end-user or potential stakeholder will be
able to monitor the ongoing process of the project. In addition, we will also publish the results of this work
in conference proceedings and present at relevant conferences. This disseminated work will also be made
available via the project Git website and the home page.

Empirical Validation

Both formative and summative methods will be employed to evaluate the proposed project. An iterative
formative evaluation will allow the testing and successive improvements of the different services designed for
realizing CDASH. Specifically, the formative evaluation will consists of designing scenarios (see the Section on
Randomized Trials) that will enable an empirical evaluation of various techniques developed in the research.
In the case of CDASH initiated police hotspot patrols, officers time in the hotspots will be tracked using
a designated call sign upon entering and exiting the hotspot [52]. The amount of patrol time applied for
various tasks (traffic accident mitigation, property crime deterrence, EMS response) can then be regressed
with social harm reduction to assess impact of policing on individual social harm event types. For non-police
participants, including EMS, NAMI, and individual citizens, location tracking within the app will be used
to infer activities. For example if a push notification is given to EMS and in the following 30 minutes the
vehicle positions itself in the recommended location, then that will be inferred to be a cDASH initiated
activity. A similar approach will be used to detect soft patrols by citizens.
Summative evaluation will be used to assess the overall success of the project. Therefore, it will take place
during the last phase of the project, after the formative evaluations yield acceptable results. Essentially, the
following and similar questions will be addressed during the summative phase: (i) was this project successful
and what were its strengths and weaknesses?, (ii) did the research meet the overall goal of providing a novel
approach to predicting events of social harm?, iii) what were the advantages (e.g., reduction in time) of
the proposed approach?, (iv) to what extent were the proposed process and the prototypes compliant with
alternatives?, and (v) to what extent does it aid in understanding basic insights into data and evidence
approach for modeling and predicting social harm situations in realistic cities? The Goal-Quality-Metric
(GQM) approach [6] will be used to judge the answers to these questions.

2.3 Phase 3: Randomized controlled trial of social harm predictive policing


We will conduct a randomized controlled trial (RCT) in the third phase of the project to test whether
the proposed CDASH system measurably reduces the overall intensity of social harm. We will compare
the proposed methodology to IMPD existing practice that focuses on a static social harm index [58, 68].
Currently, the IMPD social harm index is limited to crime incidents and disorder-related calls for service; it
does not include emergency medical calls for service or traffic-related incidents. Moreover, the IMPD social
harm index does not operate in a real-time manner as it is limited to historical data counts to identify high
priority areas to reallocate police resources (i.e., every six months reports are generated to identify high
volume police areas).
The RCT will be a block randomized design treating patrol zones as the experimental unit of analysis.

9
IMPD uses 6 large service districts in the city (Northwest, North, East, Southwest, Southeast, and Down-
town). These larger services districts are then broken down into smaller patrol zones. IMPD uses a total
of 52 patrol zones throughout the city of Indianapolis. These 52 zones are comprised of 34 regular patrol
zones, 15 hot spot zones, and 3 entertainment zones. The hot spots zones were identified using the social
harm index and represent areas of the city that account for large proportions of calls for service. In total,
these 15 hot spot zones represent 4% of IMPD’s jurisdiction, but account for 35% of police calls for service.
The 3 entertainment zones are popular night life areas (i.e., concentrations of bars, restaurants, and special
events) of the city that gather large crowds during evening and weekend periods and require additional police
resources.
The RCT design will randomly select half of the regular patrol and hot spot patrol zones, and one of
the entertainment zones, to serve as the treatment group. Thus, 17 regular zones, 8 hot spot zones, and
1 entertainment zone will receive the proposed CDASH system as the treatment condition for a total of
26 treatment groups (of the 52 total). The random selection will be weighted to capture representation
from each of the 6 larger service districts, ensuring the RCT design will capture variation in social harm
throughout the city. The remaining 26 zones will serve as the experimental control group which, again, will
be representative of the city as a whole. Each patrol unit, or officer, assigned to patrol a treatment zone will
receive the proposed software. Thus, all officers patrolling within an assigned treatment zone will receive the
treatment condition. Officers assigned to patrol control zones will not receive the treatment condition and
will conduct operations as normal. Currently IMPD partners with Indianapolis EMS for responding to drug
overdoses and EMS has written a letter of support for the project. Only patrol cars with EMS paramedics
in treatment beats will utilize the CDASH application. Additionally, soft patrols conducted by citizens will
be restricted to treatment areas [4].
Leveraging randomly selected patrol zones throughout the city and across each type of zone lends a
number of advantages to the experimental design. First, variation in social harm is likely to manifest across
different parts of the city. Randomization by patrol zone with representativeness from each geographic part
of the city is most likely to capture this variation in both the treatment and control groups. Second, the level
of police activity, and types of calls for service, will vary across both city geography and zone type (regular,
hotspot, entertainment). The proposed randomization scheme should capture these differences in both the
treatment and control groups. This is especially salient to police activities in these different areas as the
proposed policing software (treatment condition) is intended to positively impact police response. Thus,
varying police activity levels and activity types, such as operations, will be captured in both experimental
groups for comparison. Third, randomization by patrol zone increases implementation fidelity of the exper-
imental design. We also note that the sample size for comparison is not the number of beats, but instead
the number of incidents occurring during the experimental period in the treatment and control areas. For
example, approximately 5,600 burglaries occurred within a 6 month period in 2015 in Indianapolis. At this
volume a crime rate reduction difference of 1% across treatment and control would be statistically significant.
Measurement of police activities will be conducted via a dedicated call sign, as we have used in past
randomized controlled trials of predictive policing of property crime [52]. Patrol officers in treatment areas
will call into dispatch upon entering and exiting a hotspot so as to track the amount of time and the location
of the patrol. EMS vehicles utilizing the CDASH, along with soft patrols by citizens, will be tracked via
geolocation services embedded in the application. Rather than dictating a certain amount of patrol time in
hotspots, the experiment will attempt to replicate realistic patrol levels and officers make extra patrols when
not on a call to service as was done in [52]. While this will lead to day to day variation (see Figure 4), such
variation will exist in both treatment and control areas.
The experiment should have minimal adverse impact on daily IMPD administrative and operational
management since the experiment will randomize by existing patrol zones. The proposed design also enables
efficient data collection and analysis based on these existing zones. For these same reasons, anticipated
outcomes of improved police operations can be more easily implemented following the study. Lastly, RCT
in the field of policing are subject to a number of potential threats. Adherence to the experimental design
is addressed in the above point, but this approach also reduces the likelihood of attrition from both the
treatment and control groups as patrol zones will have to be covered (patrolled) regardless of which officer(s)

10
2000
A
1000
180

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Minutes per box


2000 140
B
1000
100

0
0 25 50 75 100 125 150
60
2000
C
1000 20

0
0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225
Days of experiment

Figure 4: Los Angeles predictive policing experiment total minutes on mission per day in (A) Foothill, (B) North
Hollywood, and (C) Southwest Divisions. Color represents the distribution of total minutes of patrol in hotspots
receiving greater (blue) or lower (yellow) amounts of patrol per day.

is assigned to the zone. Thus, each treatment group will receive a constant intervention. Randomization by
patrol zone with geographic representativeness also helps to safeguard against concerns of the stable unit
value transfer assumption [63]. As patrol zones are contiguous to one another (i.e., they border one another),
this creates the potential for officers in a treatment zone to cross over and assist officers in a control zone.
While such contamination cannot be fully prevented, randomization across the city best ensures officers from
both groups will not bleed over and have a contamination effect.
The RCT experimental period will run for a duration of 6 months, from April 1, 2019 – September
30, 2019. This 6 month period was chosen for two reasons. First, this period allows proper time for the
proposed policing software to be specified, tested, and made field-ready. Second, metrics of social harm
exhibit seasonal variability with peaks during these months [42] and thus positions the experimental period
to maximize observations. Prior to the experiment start date, the research team will work with IMPD
information technology, patrol, and training personnel to field-test the proposed software and receive training
on how to access and utilize the proposed software prior to the experiment start date.

2.4 Policing activities


Extensive criminological research has demonstrated that crime concentrates in both micro-places [72] and
micro-times [65] and that directed policing tactics in these places and times can lead to significant reductions
of crime and disorder [11,64]. The proposed real-time social harm policing program will enable IMPD officers

11
to engage in a number of strategies proven to be effective in reducing crime, traffic-related disorder, and drug
activity. Policing strategies to reduce crime and disorder in hot spots include increased patrols [69], random
directed patrols in 15-minute intervals [41], situational crime prevention tactics that harden targets and
alter criminal environments [9], problem-oriented policing [10], and intelligence sharing to target habitual
offenders [33]. IMPD may also be able to leverage community citizens to assist in crime reduction strategies.
Known as “soft policing”, citizens can volunteer to patrol high social harm risk areas while wearing clothing
with the IMPD logo. This strategy, when combined with outreach programs to inform community members
of these volunteer activities, has been shown to reduce crime and social harm [4].
Deploying focused police patrols to problem areas has also been shown to have positive impacts on traffic
disorder, such as reductions in speeding [61], traffic fatalities [24], and vehicle crashes [55]. Data-driven
approaches to police problem-solving, such as the identification of environmental characteristics and police
activity levels, have also shown to reduce vehicle crashes [22]. Beyond generating the aforementioned traffic-
related improvements, increased traffic enforcement has been shown to have crime reducing benefits while
simultaneously avoiding adverse outcomes among community members experiencing increased police activity
[21]. Strategies to combat drug related activity rely on effective data analysis and community engagement.
One such strategy, the drug market intervention program, leverages a “pulling levers” approach inclusive of
three stages: identification phase, notification phase, and resource delivery. During the identification phase,
high-density crime areas that have a high occurrence of drug activity are identified through mapping, calls for
service, and data from other relevant agencies (such as EMS). During the notification phase, collaboration
between agencies and community groups is central to changing the communities’ perceptions and norms.
This phase involves communication from police, prosecution officials, service providers, and others to notify
possible offenders of the sanctions and services available to them. The final stage, resource delivery, involves
law enforcement speaking with known offenders and completing a needs assessment. The law enforcement
officers would inform offenders that if they continued to engage in drug activity they would be arrested
immediately; however, if they chose to desist then no punitive action would be taken against them. By
integrating disparate crime and EMS data into the proposed software program, IMPD and other community
stakeholders would be able to develop such an intervention program that has demonstrated significant drug
and crime reductions [23].

2.5 Community participation and soft policing


The proposed project is a close collaboration between the PIs at IUPUI and IMPD. The culmination of the
project will be a randomized controlled field trial where the IMPD will use the prototype software system to
dynamically police heterogeneous social harm in patrol beats for a 6 month period of time. As social harm
encompasses a range of community issues, the project will leverage, and has received formal support from,
community stakeholders such as Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services, Indianapolis Mayor’s Office, Na-
tional Alliance of Mental Illness, Marion County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Indy Public Safety Foundation.
These diverse partners will provide the research team and IMPD with data and professional expertise that
will assist in the development of successful programming and interventions to reduce the risk of social harm
in the Indianapolis community. Moreover, the project includes a community engagement component aimed
at measuring and improving trust in predictive policing and police in general. A public pre/post survey
will be conducted in the treatment and control areas for assessing public perception of police legitimacy,
performance, professionalism, and procedural justice as well as community perceptions of satisfaction with
the police, fear of crime, physical and social disorder, and trust. Furthermore, a subset of dynamic policing
activities will include community policing aimed at improving public trust in treatment experimental units.
IMPD activities will also include community engagement to improve trust and legitimacy [8], information
sharing with neighborhood residents during foot patrols, attendance of community meetings, visits to local
schools, etc. Lastly, community engagement may be achieved through a “soft policing” program wherein
community citizens volunteer to assist with police patrols in high risk social harm areas; a strategy shown
to reduce crime and disorder [4].

12
2.6 Heterogeneous data sources
The proposed social harm program will integrate disparate sources of data that are currently not utilized
in tandem by the IMPD, nor any other police agency in the country to our knowledge. The following
data will be integrated to reflect social harm in Indianapolis. Crime and disorder data is contained within
IMPD’s computer-aided dispatch and records management systems and includes all incident-relevant factors,
such as incident type, dispatch time, call clearance time, and officer action (i.e., outcome such as arrest or
citation). Official uniform crime reporting data will also be leveraged where appropriate. IMPD will also
provide all calls for service and officer-initiated runs in the field. Complaints against police officers are
collected by the Indianapolis Citizens Police Complaint Office and is inclusive of complaint type (i.e., use
of force, unprofessionalism), geo-code and time-stamp of the incident generating the complaint, and number
of officers filed against in each complaint. Vehicle crash data are captured within Automated Reporting
Information Exchange System (ARIES). This state-run ARIES program provides IMPD officers a user-
friendly method of completing and submitting electronic crash reports. Crash data includes information
on crash type, crash severity, primary factor causing the crash. environmental conditions during the crash,
and any injuries to persons/property involved. Emergency medical services data are captured in a system
similar to police computer-aided dispatch and records management system. Data metrics include call type
(i.e., drug overdose), dispatch time, call clearance time, destination (i.e., hospital), and actions taken by
responding EMS personnel. All of the aforementioned data, from all sources, is geocoded and time-stamped.
Each aforementioned organization has formally agreed to provide all relevant data to support the proposed
project.

3 Project coordination and timeline


The proposed project is a collaboration between faculty and graduate students in the Computer Science
department, the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at IUPUI, the IMPD, and participating com-
munity groups and members. To facilitate cross-discipline collaboration, the PIs and graduate student team
members will hold bi-weekly meetings and the PIs will hold a quarterly meeting with government partners
to present progress on each project phase and to coordinate the planning of the randomized controlled trial.
Each PI will hold weekly 1-1 meetings with their respective team members to make sure sufficient progress
is made in between monthly meetings.
The project also involves a significant, coordinated software engineering component. PIs Mohler and Raje
will lead this effort using agile software development workflows. Raje will manage the team building the
backend infrastructure and data pipe, along with the front end UI for the mobile app that will be distributed
to IMPD and community members. Mohler will manage the team building the predictive modeling engine
used to determine patrol priorities. Carter will take the lead working with command staff partners at IMPD
to solicit feedback on the UI design. A Gantt chart for the project is displayed in Figure 5.

4 Educational objective
The PIs for this project, as indicated earlier, are both from the Computer and Information Science (CIS) and
SPEA at IUPUI. Each department offers courses that are in tune with the theme of the proposed research.
For example, the CIS department has a sequence of graduate courses aimed at distributed systems (CSCI
53700 and CSCI 60300) and trusted computing (CSCI 59000). This sequence of courses is very popular and
is typically offered each year.
These courses strive to balance the theoretical aspects (e.g., distributed system models) and practical
applications (e.g., a requirement of a semester project in all the CS grad courses). Various topics proposed
in this effort will act as possible case studies and topics for semester projects in these courses. Hence, the
educational goal of this proposal is to facilitate a systematic integration of principles, data, and simulation

13
9/1/17 9/1/18 9/1/19 8/31/20

Point process model development

Dynamic reource alloca<on algorithm


development
CDASH database integra<on and backend
development

IMPD, EMS, NAMI pre-experiment planning

CDASH model services development

CDASH front end development

Pre-experiment CDASH tes<ng

Randomized controlled trial of CDASH

Publica<on of RCT results

Workshop

Figure 5: Timeline of the 3-year project.

of various models into the design of modern data-centric and distributed systems. In particular, the current
course curriculum in each of these courses will be extended to reflect this approach.
Mohler teaches the graduate numerical optimization course at IUPUI and uses point process estimation
as an example for illustrating techniques such as gradient descent, BFGS, and MCMC. He also teaches an
undergraduate intro to data science course and draws upon crime datasets for examples in class assignments.
Mohler anticipates funding for a NSF REU site on the data science of risk and human activity. He has 10
years of experience supervising undergraduate research in computational mathematics, statistics and data
science. Out of the 19 undergraduate students that the PI has supervised, 9 were either women or students
from under-represented minorities. 12 of the students went on to pursue graduate degrees in STEM. 3 of
the 10 projects led to publications. If funded, components of the research outlined here would be a natural
fit for 8 week team-based projects in the data science REU, for example undergraduate students could test
competing point process models of social harm to aid in model selection for the project.
SPEA courses revolve around issues in public policy, community engagement, criminal justice organiza-
tions, and evidence-based policy analysis. SPEA offers graduate and undergraduate degrees in public affairs
with majors in civic leadership, management, media and public affairs, policy studies, non-profit manage-
ment, and sustainable policy as well as a degrees in criminal justice with majors in crime analysis and public
safety management. These courses develop synthesis across research, education, professional development,
and community service that align with the educational goals of this proposal. Students are encouraged
to leverage data analytics to develop evidence-based policy decisions that guide the effective management
of public and private organizations. The process of identifying factors that influence community risk and

14
social harm is central to the educational process and eventual professional placement in SPEA and will
be reflected in course delivery consistent with this proposal. Carter teaches the graduate and undergrad-
uate courses in evidence-based crime policy at IUPUI. His curriculum integrates meta-analysis and policy
processes (implementation and evaluation) to disentangle the complex public policy environment. He has
7 years of experience supervising graduate and undergraduate students across three institutions (Michigan
State University, University of North Florida, and IUPUI) including serving on doctoral committees at
Rutgers University, John Jay College CUNY, and Indiana University-Bloomington. Two of these doctoral
committees are for underrepresented minorities. Carter’s students at IUPUI, with an average course size
of 45 students, are largely ethnically and socioeconomically diverse, including many first-generation college
students.

5 PI qualifications and results from prior NSF support


Mohler has three pending grants and one ongoing grant titled “NSF Grant and SES-1343123 INSPIRE:
Computational modeling of grievances and political instability through global media.” The award is for
$2,594,533 and runs from 9/14 to 8/17 with a subaward to Mohler of $41,425 (summer 2 & 3). Intellectual
merit: The award focuses on developing self-exciting point process models for measuring the level of cross-
excitation between social media, web content, and conflict and political instability. Broader impact:
Mohler has three research products related to the project, one published [52] and two in review [?, 54].
Mohler was previously supported by NSF Grant DMS-0968309 FRG: Mathematics of large scale urban
crime (2010-2013). Intellectual merit: the project focused on spatio-temporal crime patterns and models
with spatially embedded social networks, especially with regard to gang activity. Broader impacts: Mohler
co-authored 9 publications through the project [?, 43, 44, 49–51, 53, 70, 74], co-mentored 2 PhD students and
two undergraduate student publications in SIAM Undergraduate Research Online.
This work continues a line of research projects Carter is currently managing with IMPD. Other projects
include the identification of spatiotemporal crime patterns to examine near repeat crime, spatiotemporal
convergence of crime and vehicle crash hot spots, and the identification of drug-related hot spots in Indi-
anapolis. Carter has also developed and delivered an intelligence and crime analysis training program for
IMPD personnel that was funded by the Central Indiana Community Foundation. He has also been the PI
on projects funded by the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice to evaluate technology
adoption. These projects included wireless broadband for police activities in Brookline, MA [14, 15, 34],
over-the-air-programming of land mobile radios in Raleigh, NC [35], managed access cellular systems in a
state prison in Parchman, MS [25], and GPS monitoring of offenders in Denver, CO [16]. His research has
also focused on the implementation of intelligence-led policing programs using methods such as structural
equation modeling [12], Poisson and negative binomial regression modeling [18], force-field analysis [17],
and mixed-methods saturation (Carter et al., 2016). He has published articles using additional analytical
techniques such as fixed effects regression modeling [13], time series [14], and human factors engineering [62].
His research has been funded by the National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security, among others. Carter was the Chair of the Standing Scientific Review
Panel for the U.S. Department of Justice.
Prof. Raje’s expertise is in developing quality-aware distributed software systems. His team, in recent
past, has been exploring various aspects of quantifying, modeling, and predicting trust of individual software
services and ensembles created out of them. For example, in [28], he and his coauthors have proposed an
evidence-based model for quantifying trust. Similarly, in [29–32], they have defined different trust com-
position models for predicting trust values of composed distributed systems. These models have used the
principles of theory of evidence, subjective logic, context-awareness and machine learning. They have suc-
cessfully used the models on real distributed systems – e.g., an opportunistic indoor tracking system [30,60].
Some of these efforts have been supported in past by the Purdue Research Foundation and the Security and
Software Engineering Research Center – an NSF I/UCRC entity. In the proposed research these models and
associated ideas will be employed in the creation of the trust prediction service of CDASH.

15
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Integration and Management Plan

Integration and Multi-Disciplinary Context

We have assembled a multi-disciplinary team of researchers to undertake the proposed research. George
Mohler is an associate professor of computer science and is an expert on computational statistics and spatial-
temporal point process modeling with applications to crime and security. Mohler has experience building
algorithms and software for predictive policing and has conducted randomized controlled trials of predictive
policing in Los Angeles and Kent (UK). Jeremy Carter is an assistant professor of criminal justice with
research expertise in intelligence-led policing, police operations, and organizational technology adoption. His
research has been funded by the National Institute of Justice and U.S. Department of Homeland Security to
support police operations projects across the United States. Carter has also served as chair of the Standing
Scientific Review Panel for the U.S. Department of Justice. Rajeev Raje is a professor of computer science
at IUPUI. Raje’s expertise is designing distributed software systems. His current efforts have focused on the
trust of individual software services and distributed systems made out of them. He will lead the efforts on
designing and developing necessary abstractions and associated smart services and their compositions using
the principles of trusted services.
Graduate students participating in the project will have an opportunity to serve on an interdisciplinary
team of social and computer scientists. They will gain valuable exposure to research practices in designing
field experiments of software control systems in smart cities that would only be possible through this type
of interdisciplinary collaboration. The PI also anticipates funding for a REU on Data Science, Risk and
Human Activity and summer projects on algorithms for social harm would be a natural fit in the program.
The proposed project is a close collaboration between the PIs at IUPUI and the Indianapolis Metropoli-
tan Police Department (IMPD). The culmination of the project will be a randomized controlled field trial
where the IMPD will use the prototype software system to dynamically police heterogeneous social harm
in patrol beats for a 6 month period of time. As social harm encompasses a range of community issues,
the project will leverage, and has received formal support from, community stakeholders such as Indianapo-
lis Emergency Medical Services, Indianapolis Mayor’s Office, National Alliance of Mental Illness, Marion
County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Indy Public Safety Foundation. These diverse partners will provide
the research team and IMPD with data and professional expertise that will assist in the development of
successful programming and interventions to reduce the risk of social harm in the Indianapolis community.
A randomized controlled field trial will be conducted to measure the impact of the prototype software
system when used for connecting community groups for dynamic intervention of heterogeneous social harm
in patrol beats for a 6 month period of time. Within the trial, IMPD patrol officers will make dedicated
patrols in social harm hotspots aimed at property crime, traffic accidents, EMS calls to service and trust.
IMPD is developing a formal unit called the Mobile Crisis Unit wherein an EMS paramedic will be assigned
to a patrol with an officer for responding to calls for service related to drug overdoses. These units are a
natural test bed for the CDASH system in terms of integrating data analytics between IMPD and EMS and
measuring the impact of data driven collaborations. Another community component of the project will be
the use of soft patrols wherein IMPD may leverage citizens to provide a “police” presence, which may be
achieved through neighborhood watch programs and citizen volunteers for patrolling. Finally, a version of
the CDASH application will be made available to the general public to provide information on social harm
trends in city neighborhoods.
There will also be a community engagement component aimed at measuring and improving trust in
predictive policing and policing in general. A public pre/post survey will be conducted in the treatment and
control areas for assessing public perception, trust in police, and fear of crime and social harm during the
trial. Furthermore, a subset of dynamic policing activities will include soft policing conducted by community
members aimed at both reducing social harm and improving public trust in treatment experimental units.

1
Management

PIs Mohler, Raje, and Carter are all faculty at IUPUI and will hold bi-weekly in person progress meetings
for the entire team, including CS and SPEA graduate student team members. PI Mohler will be in charge
of coordinating and running these meetings. Additionally, PIs will hold weekly 1-1 individual meetings
with graduate students that they directly supervise. Separately, the PIs will hold quarterly meetings with
partners from the IMPD, EMS, NAMI, the mayor’s and prosecutor’s office. Carter will coordinate and
run these meetings. Closer to the start of the randomized controlled trial, partner meetings may increase in
frequency to bi-weekly and Carter will be in charge of participant training prior to the start of the experiment.
We note that the PIs have already had preliminary meetings with the proposed government partners and
IMPD and Indianapolis EMS have already provided data to the PIs.
In year 2 a public pre/post survey will be conducted in the treatment and control areas for assessing public
perception of police legitimacy, performance, professionalism, and procedural justice as well as community
perceptions of satisfaction with the police, fear of crime, physical and social disorder, and trust. Carter will
take the lead on coordinating the survey with a consultant who will be charged with executing the survey.
The project also involves a significant, coordinated software engineering component. PIs Mohler and Raje
will lead this effort using agile software development workflows. Raje will manage the team building the
backend infrastructure and data pipe, along with the front end UI for the mobile app that will be distributed
to IMPD and community members. Mohler will manage the team building the predictive modeling engine
used to determine patrol priorities. Carter will take the lead working with command staff partners at IMPD
and EMS to solicit feedback on the UI design. A version of the CDASH app will be released to the public
through both android and iOS app stores. Mohler will work with the graduate students on releasing the app
through these platforms and will also work with IUPUI media relations on a press release to increase the
visibility of the app.
A publicly-available project website – home page for the project – (http://CDASH.cs.iupui.edu) will be
maintained at IUPUI. All the software code, documentation, research outcomes will be available on this
home page. In addition, through the use of the GitHub, an online web-based Git repository system (hosted
at the Indiana University), the deployment of the CDASH will take place through end-user downloads of the
source and executable code. A release stable version of the software will be made available via a hyperlink on
the GitHub project home page and the project home page. Along with this software will be a user manual
that will provide a step-by-step guide to install and customize the software. As all of the documentation and
source code will be residing on publicly accessible locations, the end-user or potential stakeholder will be
able to monitor the ongoing process of the project. In addition, we will also publish the results of this work
in conference proceedings and present at relevant conferences. This disseminated work will also be made
available via the project Git website and the home page.
A workshop on the theme of modeling heterogeneous event data for smart cities will be held in the
summer of year 3 at IUPUI. Mohler will take the lead on constructing a website for the workshop, recruiting
participants, and coordinating the schedule with IUPUI staff. The workshop will be aimed at a combination
of researchers, postdocs, and graduate students working on point processes, smart and connected cities,
crime and social harm, along with speakers from government. We aim to have equal representation from
computer and mathetmatical sciences, the social sciences, and government.
Mohler also anticipates funding for a NSF REU site on the data science of risk and human activity.
Mohler will take the lead on supervising a project on comparing point process models of social harm, which
is a natural fit for a 10 week group project under the theme of data science and risk.

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