Following an incident of sexual assault on the University of Virginia grounds in 1992, President John Casteen organized the Council on Community to study campus violence in the context of the entire Charlottesville and Albemarle County communities. Professor Janet Warren served as the Chair of the Working Group on Data, Strategy and Implementation, collecting data on all incidents of interpersonal violence that involved University students, faculty and staff, both on- and off-grounds, from 1990-1992. The Working Group analyzed and summarized the University's crime prevention needs in an internal report entitled Understanding Campus Violence: The University of Virginia 1990-1992.
During this early phase of the work, the MapInfo geographical system enabled the visual display of the data according to time, location, type and severity of the crime. Dr. Warren and Dr. Donald Brown of the Department of Systems Engineering have continued this effort by refining this Geographical Information System (GIS) as a prototype for a more complex and integrated information system to connect the University, the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County Police Departments. At present, these three police departments do not have the capability to share crime information. Funded by a grant from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, the project, now entitled "Campus and Workplace Violence: A Crime Prevention Perspective," is a multi-disciplinary study of campus and workplace violence and related crime.
Working with the three police departments to develop a shared GIS among the jurisdictions, Drs. Warren and Brown will enhance crime prevention abilities in the region. The project will enable them to more precisely collect and analyze crime data to further and deepen the knowledge of violence, substance abuse and property crime on college and university campuses. It is intended to also eventually result in the authoring of a software package that could be used by other universities and colleges to study and identify their campus crime problems, by hospitals and other large employee settings to address workplace violence, and as a model for cooperation and information sharing for police agencies in overlapping jurisdictions throughout Virginia.