Crime prevention, spatial analysis, homelessness, and craft breweries: seemingly random topics, or the basis for groundbreaking research? UC San Diego professor Julie Wartell identifies a significant connection here in her work as a researcher and urban studies and planning professor at UCSD.

Wartell uses geographic information systems and crime mapping to influence public policy and urban planning. By engaging in policy-oriented projects, serving as a consultant for law enforcement, and giving her students real-world knowledge, Wartell brings her unique expertise in mapping crime to meaningfully better her classrooms and community.

After Wartell completed her undergraduate degree at UCSD, her interest in criminology led her to San Diego State University for a master’s degree in public administration with an emphasis in criminal justice administration.

“It was during that master’s degree [that] we had to do an internship, and this was back before the internet, so it was a big book, and there was a job [that] advertised an internship at [the] San Diego Police Department in crime analysis for $8 an hour or something,” Wartell said. “And I didn’t know what crime analysis was, but it paid, so I applied for it and got it.”

She later joined a SDPD project that analyzed drug dealing in rental properties using crime mapping and GIS. During this project, she was introduced to crime maps and how to make them.

“I don’t think I even knew what GIS stood for,” Wartell said. “But I really got interested. I always loved maps as a kid, so it fit that ‘Wow, I can make maps about interesting things like crime.’”

Wartell has cultivated a “synergistic” relationship between her real-world experience and her research and teaching; her experiences led to her current career of using GIS to analyze crime, homelessness, and urban economies. While working at the SDPD, Wartell spoke at the National Institute of Justice’s Crime Mapping Center in 1997 about her work using crime mapping and spatial analysis. The NIJ then invited her to be a fellow in Washington, D.C., where she lived and worked for nine months.

“I was brought there to help bridge research and practice,” she explained. “So, it was still pretty new for police departments to use GIS to study crime. A lot of researchers were doing it, so that’s what sent me, really, on not only the GIS and mapping trajectory, but seeing that there was life outside of [the] San Diego Police Department.”

Her fellowship inspired her to continue a career as a mapper, and Wartell went on to work for the Redlands Police Department, the San Diego district attorney’s office, and related nonprofits. At the district attorney’s office, Wartell worked as a crime analyst and managed a project that created a novel public crime mapping website.

This is what caught the attention of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UCSD, which contacted her to teach GIS for urban and community planning in the USP department in 2008. 

Wartell is now a continuing lecturer who teaches three USP classes: craft breweries and the urban economy, environmental design and crime prevention, and crime analysis research methods. 

Her niche craft breweries course came about while building her website PubQuest, a map of breweries, when she realized that they improve local communities by offering third places for residents.

“My research expanded to not just, ‘Where are the breweries?’ but sustainability issues, and gentrification, and crime,” she said. “I used to always say that ‘I mapped crime by day and beer by night, and never the two together,’ but then started thinking about that breweries actually don’t generate crime problems like bars do.”

In her book, “Craft Breweries and Cities: Perspectives from the Field,” Wartell describes craft breweries as family-friendly “community-gathering spot[s]” that could even prevent crime.

Wartell’s classes are rooted in her vast reservoir of real-life experience. Wartell encourages her students not just to learn the material, but to apply it to tangible and positive work. Toward this goal, she assigns a final project in her environmental design and crime prevention course where students research crime issues in a city, collect data on a chosen location, and use what they’ve learned in class to make recommendations on how to reduce crime.

“I know several students have taken [their project] to their city or to real life, to say, ‘Hey, I did this work,’” Wartell said. “‘If you want to help clean up the park, this is the work that I’ve done to prepare.’”

In her spare time, she consults on crime for police departments.

In 2020, Wartell and her colleagues in the urban studies and planning department noticed that no researchers were mapping homelessness-related data in San Diego County. Together, they obtained a grant to initiate the Homelessness Hub, a USP department project that conducts research on homelessness and informs policy solutions.

“The Homelessness Hub isn’t directly serving people experiencing [homelessness] but [is] informing, using our research to inform policy and further research,” Wartell explained. “We have a wide variety of data. … Where are bus stops? Where is affordable housing? Where are public libraries or public restrooms?”

As the Homelessness Hub’s GIS manager, Wartell collects, analyzes, and visualizes data about the unhoused population and public infrastructure. Her work also explores the role of the police and crime rates on homelessness.

Another of Wartell’s projects is with Parks After Dark, a program that opens select city parks for a few nights a week each summer and transforms them “into lively hubs of activity, entertainment, and connection.” In collaboration with one of the event’s donors, Price Philanthropies foundation, Wartell conducts evaluations of Parks After Dark’s impact on the communities it serves, with a focus on how safe parkgoers feel and the event’s effect on neighborhood crime.

One way she makes an effort to better embrace both the environment and the community within it is by going to different parks in the city and asking parkgoers questions in person.

“I just like to understand the places that I’m analyzing, because sometimes that will contribute to my understanding of the results,” Wartell explained. 

For Wartell, encouraging connections with the communities she studies helps both her and her students conduct better research and offer substantive solutions.