With the recent emphasis towards proactive Community Oriented Policing and the increase in the use of computerized information systems for data collection police departments are faced with two major problems: (1) how to mine the vast amounts of data produced by these systems, and (2) how to use this data to provide information that supports proactive law enforcement.
This dissertation makes a contribution in this area by providing the model specification and framework for such tools, a GIS-based date collection system, and a new spatio-temporal forecasting method--chaotic cellular forecasting (CCF)--for use by an early warning system for emerging drug markets.