Written by Gabrielle Pruitt
The blue lights show up in the rearview mirror, the siren wails, and the tension sets in with the frantic scrambling to find paperwork. Being pulled over by a police officer is not most people’s favorite experience, but Dr. Dana Steil has been doing research to help the policemen’s process go much smoother.Steil,of Harding’s computer science department, recently earned his Ph.D.from the University of Alabama, conducting his dissertation research on the use of police patrol routing to target crash “hot spots,”involv- ing identification of segments of highway that have a high frequency of crashes.Steil then worked to create complimentary patrol cover- age that was not just with individual officers to cover each “hot spot.” By utilizing a small programming language that he helped develop, the program would help define police patrol routes and then evaluate the actions that take place along those routes for patrol flexibility. He worked closely with the Center for Advanced Public Safety at the University of Alabama to assist in the implementation of a completely paperless electronic crash reporting system.Returning to Harding, Steil brought this research with him and continued working on the program full time with six students in the computer science department.They wrote software for police officers and administrative offices of the courts for a variety of purposes: background checks for people whom the officers pull over, traffic safety analysis and crash data analysis. This is where the term HUB-CAPS came from – Harding University Branch of the Center for Advanced Public Safety.Steil and his group have written software that shares data between agencies and court systems as well as software that officers use to write citations and complete crash forms electronically. This is done through a Web portal called Law Enforcement Tactical System (developed by CAPS) leading to the state database.Steil’s team is in charge of the major data collection and tools for data analysis through programs like Mobile Officer Virtual Environment (also developed by CAPS).This helped officers examine specific aspects of citations, looking at genders, frequen- cies along certain highways, trends for when traffic crashes occur and categories of citations, for example, DUI and speeding. The same analysis can be conducted for crashes, crime reports, overweight trucks or other types of law enforcement and highway safety issues. A lot of the work done incorporates Geographic Information Systems. Steil and his team plotted events on maps and looked for spatial and geographical trends as to where instances occur.Students work for Steil 20 hours each week, assisting in the development of this project. One student, senior computer science major Paul Sherrod, designs and builds various tools for use by the AlabamaDepartment of Public Safety and other government agencies. Such tools he creates include the heat maps showing the distribution of citations given across the state and the Web services.”The work has been very interesting and challenging,” Sherrod said. “[It] has been great experience for what work will be like once we graduate.”Weston Castleberg helps as a CAPS programmer; he described his tasks as building and maintaining Web services and Web portals needed to access the databases.”I create databases and convert them into formats usable by our analysis engine,” Castleberg said.Of the wide variety of computer science research, Steil said he preferred doing software development andwhat he described as “getting tools in people’s hands,”which he knew the CAPS director in Alabama, Allen Parrish, would help him do.With this type of program, the students learn about organization and putting their concepts into action with Web programming. It also requires them to work directly with the Alabama DPS, sending information across the network back and forth within the database in a live scenario.Interest among groups such as Arkansas State Police and Arkansas Crime Information Center had grown upon Steil’s return to the state, so he has begun developing the same software used for the Alabama DPS here in hopes to have it ready for use sometime this year.
