In October, based on the map Diamond created, Robert Hucks, 41, a registered sex offender living in Vista, was arrested on suspicion of making the calls.

In a few weeks, Diamond can throw away her pens and paper maps. The new city budget includes $17,000 to buy CrimeView, a geographic information system (GIS) produced by San Diego-based Omega Group, which automatically transfers crime and traffic accident data onto computerized maps.

Carlsbad's law-enforcement agency is the first locally to buy the software, which is linked to the widely used ArcView GIS software developed by the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI). It has been sold to police departments all over the country, from Honolulu to Miami.

"For us, it was hardly even a sales job," Diamond said. "All we needed to see was that we could get information easily" into the CrimeView software.

For many years, local law enforcement agencies have relied on computerized databases maintained by the Automated Regional Justice Information System.

But cops and analysts could only retrieve the information as mind-numbing tables of data. It was nearly impossible to visualize trends that linked time of incident, land-use patterns, addresses of suspects and other factors.

Omega President Milan Mueller, who holds a master's degree in geography from UCLA, said he was busy developing GIS software for school districts when law enforcement agencies also asked for some mapping help.

"The Honolulu police had just got (CrimeView) up and running in a short time, no more than a month, when they called back and said they were mapping and tracking auto thefts on the island and were able to deploy personnel that resulted in capturing a couple of auto thieves," Mueller said.

The San Diego Police Department has been producing maps for several years, using ArcView software. One recent map produced for Normal Heights detective Mike Rabell identified a concentration of burglaries in part of the community.

"If you look at a list (of incidents) and try to get a mental picture of where all the places are, it can be difficult," Rabell said. "If you're presented with a map, you're looking at a specific area and can see directly the activity going on in the area. It will show you where you can concentrate your efforts."

Crime analyst Matt Turner produces summary maps every two weeks and patrol officers and detectives use them to decide where to spend their crime-prevention time.

The maps also come in handy when police meet with community groups to discuss trends.

However, SDPD maps still take a bit of jiggering to produce. To create one map, Turner had to log into the crime statistical database; define the time, location and crime types he wanted to see; copy the file into a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet; transfer it into map formatting software; and transfer it again to view it on an ArcView base map.

After completing that 10-minute chore, he discovered a glitch in his computer's connection to a plotting machine and was unable to print out a map without some additional tinkering.

"It's very user unfriendly," Turner said, somewhat exasperated.

This is not something an on-the-beat cop can use easily.

However, the department is considering buying CrimeView or another easy-to-use computer program and making it available to patrol officers as well as the general public via the Internet.

"Right now, all of the information is available to us, but it's not available in a real-time manner," said Deena Bowman-Jamieson, the department's information systems analyst. "Most of the time it can be anywhere from a day to several days' lag-time in getting the information to the crime analysis unit. What we want to do is tap into the information and make it available to analysts and other officers so that advanced analysis can be done right away."

Internet crime prevention
The department hopes once it has purchased new software it will speed up crime reporting to the point where Internet users could monitor a crime-fighting incident as it is occurring. The idea is that the police quickly could gather additional tips from a watchful -- and computer savvy -- public.
"GIS and police have gone from nothing to everything in three years," said SDPD supervising crime analyst Patrick H. Drummy. "It's a hot topic in crime control."

Obviously, the information also would be available to crooks adept at cruising the Internet. But officials doubt would-be burglars, prostitutes and other lawbreakers could plan their schemes any better by monitoring police action on the Web than they could by listening to police radio scanners.

Currently, the only San Diego Police mapping information available online are the monthly department incident reports organized by neighborhood.