THE PRODUCTION AND DEPLOYMENT OF GRASP: A GEOSPATIAL REPOSITORY FOR ANALYSIS AND SAFETY PLANNING

To develop effective public safety policies, communities invest in safety research studies that analyze current societal trends. Analyses incorporate spatial data from multiple community agencies. With a centralized spatial data repository, the researcher circumvents lengthy data collection procedures, while agencies avoid having to repeatedly process data requests. The Capstone project involves the development and deployment of the Geospatial Repository for Analysis and Safety Planning (GRASP), a collection of spatial data from participating agencies. The project, sponsored by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), builds upon work completed by the 20002001 Capstone team. The Capstone goals include the completion of GRASP deployment in the CharlotteMecklenburg, North Carolina area as well as scaling of the GRASP system to accommodate national implementation. The Capstone team tested the pilot GRASP system using data from Baltimore County, Maryland. The team, acting as Baltimore administrators, was able to customize an empty database shell using the web application. Furthermore, the team was able to successfully upload Baltimore tabular data using the upload utility. The use of GRASP will reduce the amount of time researchers and administrators spend collecting and distributing data by four orders of magnitude.