WHEREAS, resources allocated for law enforcement activities are frequently insufficient to keep pace with the demands placed on agencies to respond to calls for service and threats to public safety, including the ability to analyze and map crime and crash data; and

WHEREAS, decreasing social harm and improving quality of life for communities continue to be primary missions of law enforcement agencies; and

WHEREAS, the need for law enforcement executives to provide timely and accurate data to justify expenditures and deployment decisions will only increase as Federal, State, and local officials, along with the public, continue to scrutinize the allocation of tax dollars; and

WHEREAS, community-focused, place-based law enforcement has emerged as an effective strategy for addressing current issues of social harm and concerns for public safety; and

WHEREAS, the National Network of Fusion Centers are fast becoming critical analysis and information-sharing hubs, combining the intelligence, risk analysis, strategic and operational data from a wide variety of sources; and

WHEREAS, the implementation of a data-driven approach is a vital point, along with other strategies, for executing long-term change in which law enforcement professionals take an integrated approach to the deployment of personnel and resources; and

WHEREAS, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, and the National Institute of Justice jointly developed an intelligence-led law enforcement operational model known as Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS); and

WHEREAS, the DDACTS model integrates place-based crime and traffic crash data to establish effective and efficient methods of identifying—via geo-mapping—areas experiencing high incidences of crimes and crashes ("hot spots") and of deploying highly-visible law enforcement and other resources to resolve simultaneously crime and crash issues; and

WHEREAS, the shortage of law enforcement resources is likely to continue in the foreseeable future, law enforcement executives should strive to adopt effective strategies to further improve quality of life in communities that suffer from the effects of high crime and motor vehicle crash rates and, in doing so, should make every effort to leverage fusion centers' ability to analyze and map data in conjunction with the DDACTS model; now, therefore be it

RESOLVED that the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) recommends that all law enforcement agencies adopt and implement the Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffic Safety (DDACTS) model and improve its effectiveness by availing themselves of the considerable resources intelligence fusion centers are available to offer.

Submitted by the Homeland Security Committee
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