by the police and researchers, with environmental criminology theories playing an important part in how crime patterns are understood. Crime mapping technology allows law enforcement to collect data that will pinpoint the geography of crime incidents within a geographical area. This technique has proven to be very useful when it comes to informing officers of the location of a crime, making resource assignment decisions, assessing interventions, informing communities about crime activity, and identifying where calls are coming from in an area. Other practical applications of environmental criminology theory include geographic profiling, which is premised on the idea that criminals take into account geographic factors in deciding where to commit crimes. Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) is another practical application, based on the title of Jeffery's earlier publication, promotes the idea that situational factors such as the environment (poor lighting or design of circulation spaces) can make crime more likely to occur at a particular time and place. CPTED measures to reduce the likelihood can include added lighting, making the place less conducive for crime. Concentrated areas of high level of crime, known as crime hot spots, may have situational factors that help explain why the particular place is a problem. Could be that the place is poorly supervised, has poor "place management", has poor lighting or other characteristics. Changing some of those situational factors may help reduce levels of crime in that place. The broken windows theory is the idea that there is importance to disorder when it comes to assisting and generating crime. General disorder leads to fear from a community, which allows for more crime to be committed because of decreased social control. In other words, an un-fixed broken window will ultimately lead to more broken windows. Smaller problems such as drugs or gangs in a community that are not being actively taken care of by the police cause people to leave these areas out of fear. As the area becomes scarcer in population, the crime will progressively become more serious. See also Crime pattern theory Environmental justice Environmental law Green criminology List of environmental lawsuits Mobility triangles References . Criminology Environmental crime