and the Roles Crime Analysts Play
Worcester, MA Police Department
What do crime analysts do?
What are the tasks that fill their days? What functions of their police departments do they perform? What roles do they fill?
There are several reasons for asking. One is to provide a menu of topics for discussion, forum-style, by practitioners of the trade, the primary function of the Crime Analyst's Round Table. Thus we seek here to "set the table" by proposing a list of topics for continuing discussion, debate, and, we hope, the mutual enlightenment of participating crime analysts.
A second reason is to help analysts consider a spectrum of possibilities that may include a broader array of functions than they have inherited, or designated for themselves, or had designated for them. Some topics will be common to many, perhaps most, or even all, crime analysts, while others will be the province of fewer, and some may be thought of as best left off the table altogether, if possible. At a minimum, some readers might come across functions that are undertaken elsewhere that they had not considered and which they might decide could make useful additions to their repertoires.
A third reason arises from the possibility that circumstances may be conspiring to pressure the young profession to move in some new directions, including which might not be viewed as welcome additions by some analysts. Such forces may be at work in some police departments and not, or not yet, in others. The issue is one of the scope of the role of crime anlysis, that is, the relative breadth of its concerns.
The dawn of the 21st Century finds police departments throughout the United States and Canada, and in many other countries as well, deeply involved in the process of coming to terms with computers and computerization. Most data on crimes and others matters of police activity now reside in computers, but getting the information into digital format is the easy part. Converting the data into useful information and getting the results into useful format and in the hands of the right people are the greater challenges.
As these challenges are recognized, police officials begin to seek, or to develop "in-house," the needed expertise to make appropriate use of the growing quantities of data stored in their computers. A logical first place to look is to their offices of crime analysis, if they have them, or to develop the needed capacity if they don't.
It seems safe to say that police departments need to be able to extract data from their computers, organize and analyze those data, and disseminate the results in a timely manner to meet the needs of various divisions. This, in short, amounts to a reasonable description of the traditional role of the crime analyst. But what data, and to what purposes? Ultimately, the central issue for crime analysts is the determination of which kinds of data and what functions of the police department are to be considered the primary focus of concern.
The central question regarding the scope of the role of the crime analyst concerns the degree to which the focus of inquiry is crime, strictly interpreted. It is a matter of the relative breadth of the field of concern of the analyst, with selected "target" crimes at one end of a continuum and a wider array of functions, useful in some way to one or another division of police or the general public, at the other.
Should the field of crime analysis be defined as exclusively, or even primarily, concerned with crimes, or should its scope of inquiry encompass police-related matters that lie outside the realm of reportable crime? Does the work of the analyst properly include calls for service regarding matters which often keep police officers busy and affect the quality of life in the community, sometimes quite noticeably, but do not qualify as "target" crimes, such as robbery, burglary, or motor vehicle theft? Might the work of the analyst extend so far as to encompass traffic accidents or missing persons, warrant lists or specialized databases concerning weapons, sexual deviance, or domestic violence? Are there still other tasks of the contemporary crime analyst which fall outside the boundaries of "substantial," usually Part One, crimes?
A broadening of the role of the analyst as is implied in such non- traditional functions could lead as far as to a blurring of the distinction between the crime analyst and the "IT," or information technology, specialist. The preparation of warrant lists organized by patrol beat (or otherwise), lists of missing persons, or lists of stolen property could be viewed as providing useful "value-added" services to the department despite there being no real analytical functions involved.
Taking the idea a step further, the crime analyst-cum-IT specialist might disseminate data and processed information through an intranet, through specialty software such as GIS on distributed workstations, or even special software links to laptop computers in patrol cars, in each case providing data and information to enable enhanced analytical capabilities by police officers and officials. Another possibility is the development and maintenance of a departmental web site, or at least the crime analysis section of such a site, wherein some of the benefits of the work can be provided efficiently to the public.
At some point, however, such concern with "technology access" functions could threaten to overwhelm the traditional purposes of crime analysis, unless the office were equipped with adequate staff resources to cover all the expanding functions, which is not always the case (to say the least). Moreover, some might argue that such functions simply do not constitute crime analysis, regardless of their utility within the department.
Thus, there looms the prospect of a debate between a "strict constructionist" school of thought preferring to retain the traditional focus on target crimes, and proponents of various positions along a continuum leading through "police data analysis" and as far out as the IT specialist. The point to be made here is not that the field of crime analysis should undergo a broadening of its scope, but that consideration should be given to some possible additions to the scope of the role of the analyst, and that attention needs be given to forces which may be at work with potentially important implications for the future of crime analysis.
To outline the functions of crime analysis in an orderly manner requires some definitional clarification. The roles of a crime analyst may be said to consist of the performance of certain functions that are of value to the police department and, sometimes, the general public, pertaining to crimes and other police-related incidents or events which occur within the jurisdiction. Typically, and perhaps always, some kind of product results from the execution of a function: something of purported value formulated in a transferable mode, be it a formal report, a crime bulletin, a web page, or just a handwritten note on an index card. Ultimately, such products provide the substance of an answer to the question "what do you do for the department?" Thus, among the important topics of concern to analysts are matters of "input" (data collection and the like) and "output" (product formulation) which constitute essential elements of crime analysis functions but are not actually functions in themselves.
Some crime analysis functions may be critical, such that they must be performed; if the crime analyst doesn't do it someone else will. Others might be highly desirable and highly valued, though not necessarily critical, and others might be less important. Some functions might be very important to one division, office, or officer, but of little or no value to others in the department, and some might be of value to constituencies outside the department but not within, such as members of the City Council, the Mayor, or the members of neighborhood crime watch groups. The latter category, in particular, seems likely to include "necessary evils" for the analyst, such as the preparation of statistical reports in response to requests (or demands) from local government officials, filling out surveys, making lists of traffic accidents for highway engineers, and the like. Such tasks may be seen as lying outside the domain of crime analysis, but when the department's command structure needs such jobs done they have a way of becoming part of what crime analysts do. Thus does the role of the analyst expand into areas not always on his or her wish list.
The tasks of a crime analyst include all the activities required in the performance of the functions, and a few more as well. Some things have to be done in order to make it possible to do one's job, yet would not likely be included in a response to a question as to what services one provides. Major critical support tasks include (1) the development and maintenance of databases; (2) all manner of education, training, and communications relative to the capabilities needed to perform the functions of the job; (3) various methods and techniques of preparing suitably formatted products of one's analytical operations; and (4) the maintenance of the crime analysis unit within the department, possibly including administrative tasks such as budgeting and personnel direction, as well as the kinds of "care and feeding" practices by which support may be gained and maintained for crime analysis and communications within the department enhanced.
Some of the tasks of the crime analyst pertain entirely, or almost entirely, to the "data collection" part of the cycle. They include the various ways in which the analyst develops and maintains the database (or databases), suitably designed and filled with the needed and available information.
Three primary avenues to the acquisition of a suitable database can be outlined:
- Direct use of an adequately-designed departmental database
with ample query and reporting capabilities;
- Original data entry into the analyst's PC-based file system,
typically following, and based upon, reading handwritten
police reports;
- A hybrid involving abstracting from the department's data system into the analyst's database, and adding information taken from offfense reports and other sources.
One would be lucky indeed to be found safely and happily ensconced under the first. More likely is the second path, especially in smaller departments, but it bears the disadvantage of limiting the analyst's scope of activities due to the high cost of access to data beyond the major crimes (although some may not see that as a disadvantage), as well as that of duplicating the data entry process, even if the result is an improvement over what could be seen in read-only format in the "CAD" system.
The third alternative seems most likely to provide optimal results for the analyst, since it minimizes data entry while allowing for needed additions, such as fields for classification of crimes. In some cases the matter may be as simple as to read the departmental system and extract, or "download," from it the needed data; in others, platform differences may require more complex but equally functional exporting of data through "odbc" (open database connectivity) software.
Some may think of such matters as boring or tedious, but they are critically important to virtually everything the analyst does. Perhaps they can be thought of as the cooking of the meal of which the primary enjoyment is in the eating.
Other, related, issues in the development and maintenance of the database, each of which offers forum possibilities:
- data quality control - checks on the quality of data in the
department's system, possibly involving miscoding of information
on the various police forms;
- the relationship between the structure and content of the forms
used by police and the information that is thereby made available
to the analyst;
- UCR/NIBRS coding - a complex and time-consuming array of tasks
for crime analysis shops charged with this responsibility, and a
potentially significant quality control concern where such coding
is handled elsewhere, as by the Bureau of Records;
- the use of various kinds of computer software for the aggregation and management of potentially large and complex data sets, such as MS Access or comparable database programs or query languages.
Technically, GIS is not function of crime analysis but rather a tool used by the analyst in the performance of a variety of functions. Thus, GIS can be considered a tool through which the analyst can collect, collate, analyse, and report data, whatever the subject, from homicides to barking dog complaints, from the residences of known sex offenders to the locations of reported cases of vandalism.
On the other hand, a case also can be made that the management and use of GIS for police purposes is an ongoing task of such magnitude and complexity that it is appropriate to consider it a mainstream function of the office. In effect, this argument holds that the "care and feeding" of the Police GIS amounts to a primary function of the analyst (hopefully with the support of IT specialists as needed), over and above the uses to which the GIS is put in the service of crime analysis. In view of the heavy and increasing focus on GIS in the field, this view seems persuasive, though still debateable.
More important for present purposes is the relationship between GIS and the traditional functions of crime analysis. Basically, the central issue is whether and how crime analysis controls the applications of the powerful tool of GIS. If GIS is the vehicle, is the crime analyst in the driver's seat?
Probably the most popular function of the job for crime analysts, and the leading candidate for designation as the core function, is pattern recognition: the search for crime patterns worthy of "packaging" and dissemination in the form of alerts, bulletins, or the like.
Some analysts prefer, or feel it necessary, to concentrate their limited resources on the selected "target" crimes, often including burglary, robbery, and motor vehicle theft, and sometimes other crimes such as larceny from vehicles (or "car breaks") or vandalism, crimes which tend to be distinguished by a relative paucity of usable information in police reports.
The reliance upon narrative reports written by the officers responding to the calls, throws attention back to the "database development" phase in that the analyst typically is dependent upon the quality and the relative inclusiveness of these reports, and all too often this information is neither satisfactory nor easily subject to remedy. Basically, if the information needed to classify crimes is absent from the reports, the analyst will be hard-pressed to acquire the information.
The methods and techniques of pattern recognition and analysis (including crime series and sprees) warrant considerable focus here and elsewhere, and tend to be among the favorite topics of training courses in the field, and rightfully so. Increasingly, the tasks of identifying, supporting, and describing crime patterns are intertwined with GIS, in part because of the preference for mapped "pictures" of the patterns in lieu of lists or narrative descriptions. The issue, as noted previously, is whether and how crime analysis sits in the driver's seat, controlling the "vehicle" of GIS.
Some analysts don't deal with calls for service at all. In some cases it is because they lack direct "hands on" access to CAD data, but in others it is because they choose not to use their time on such lesser matters, perhaps because time or other resources are limited, but also possibly because they feel such matters do not "rise to the level" of crimes, which are what their jobs are all about.
Where the needed CAD access is in place, it can be argued that there are some advantages to working with calls data. They make it possible to track more completely the flotsom and jetsom of everyday life on the streets, including various "violations of public order" which, along with traffic accidents, driving infractions, and other matters, as well as reportable crimes, keep police officers busy.
Violations of public order may include, among others: disorderly conduct, fights, loud parties, gun shots, excessive noise, disputes, and untold varieties of civil disturbances; prowlers, suspicious persons, or suspicious vehicles; abandoned, obstructing, or illegally parked motor vehicles; failure to shovel walkways, dumping trash, and other environmental violations; false burglar alarms; and others as may be so defined.
One use for such data is to identify "hot spots," locations at which there have been, during a recent period of appropriate duration, noteworthy volumes of "negative occurrences," including violations of public order and whatever else the analyst chooses to include to match the purpose. The task of displaying such locations provides a particularly opportune occasion for the use of GIS mapping capabilities.
Arguments can also be made that such matters lie outside the proper scope of the role of the crime analyst. They are not crimes, or at least have not been treated as reportable crimes with all the coding and narrative report taking that follows.
The profession should benefit from a lively discussion of the pros and cons of working with calls data, especially if it is supplemented by elaborations on how such data can be "worked" to useful ends.
For starters, the analyst choosing to work with calls data likely will be faced with the following issues: (1) how to use disposition codes (by whatever title) to modify the presumptions made concerning the relative significance of calls lacking explanatory reports; (2) the selection of incident types to consider under what headings and for what purposes; and (3) how (and whether) to indicate priority weights to assign greater levels of significance to some occurrences than others.
It is just a few short steps from examination of calls for service to operations analysis. The latter takes into consideration all calls for service, including some that may be excluded even from the former function, such as those in which police play a purely service role, assisting citizens, directing traffic at accident or fire scenes, and the like. Operations analysis is difficult to define precisely, but, roughly, it concerns the factors relevant to the deployment of available manpower and other resources by the patrol (or "operations") division.
It is often conceived primarily in terms of the geographic design of beats to equalize loads, but it also has other uses, such as the daily (by shift) deployment of flexible resources (e.g., movable footbeats), best ways to cope with temporary manpower shortages, or special resource deployments intended to deal with identified problems of a (hopefully) temporary nature. Operations analysis deals with the loads placed on patrol officers by calls for service, as well as department-generated activities, including patrol-initiated stops, and it takes into consideration factors such as response time from dispatch to arrival, time required at the scene, the numbers of officers involved, and measures of the seriousness, or potential for danger, in the incidents which occur.
When beat design is at issue, which in most departments is only occasionally, factors such as neighborhood integrity, physical barriers, route mileage and related traffic factors, geographic size, population density, land-use composition, and others may be taken into consideration along with the measurements of "call loading" drawn from calls for service data and department resource limitations which constrain the numbers of beats which can be supported.
In general, operations analysis encompasses a variety of ways by which the analyst can combine measurements on an array of selected variables to ascertain a desired result, the "dependent variable," whether it be the placement of flexible resources, the allocation of manpower across shifts, the redesign of patrol beats, or locations ("hot spots") warranting special attention.
Like it or not (and clearly some do not), preparing reports on the frequency of crime in one's jurisdiction is usually part of the job. Requests for local crime rates tend to arise from the press (often following, or in conjunction with, newswire stories on FBI releases of UCR "Part One" crime statistics), local government officials, and the department's front office (often in response to one or both of the preceding).
Frequently the analyst is called upon to prepare some kind of comparative basis for UCR reports, such as cities of comparable size within the state or region. Some will argue, however, the Uniform Crime Reporting statistics are not quite as uniform as they should be and that such comparisons are risky at best. The longitudinal approach, showing trends over time in the same jurisdiction yields certain advantages over comparative statistics but typically the demand for comparative perspectives does not fade as a result.
Beyond the reporting of UCR data on the major crimes, a number of other formats are conceivable, and likely can be of greater real value. One is to present a wider array of police-related indicators, such as counts of "lesser crimes" and instances of public disorder, total calls for service, numbers of arrests, and numbers of various non-criminal matters, such as traffic accidents, missing persons, and various other problems that police are called upon to resolve.
Some other possible, and for some, likely, applications of statistical reporting:
- data for college campus police departments in relation to the
requirements of the Clery Act;
- counts or lists of traffic accidents at specified locations for
a variety of purposes, including the needs of traffic engineers
(may be function of the Bureau of Records in some cases);
- special counts, list, or summaries of crimes and other police incidents at specific locations in response to the needs of local government officials, the chief's upcoming meeting, or officers working with neighborhood "crime watch" groups, perhaps under the heading of community policing.
Clearly, community policing and other aspects of police-community
relations may be served by well-designed and timely reports showing a
variety of data from police data files, and the office of crime analysis
seems like the most likely place for police officials to turn. It may be
that what is worse than being asked to prepare such reports would be not
being asked.
Here we encounter a function which can be defined with little difficulty but for which the search for a suitable title is not so easy. What we will call, for lack of a better title, the suspect search and analysis function focusses primarily on people, usually known offenders and their associates, rather than events, and is oriented to the search for possible suspects as an aid to investigations. This function is related to intelligence analysis, but does not promise as much.
Central to the usefulness of this "suspect scanning" capability is the analyst's construction and maintenance of a database containing enough information to yield a significant improvement in the capacity to identify potential suspects when only limited descriptive data are available.
Key data elements in such a database include (but are not limited to) the following:
- personal characteristics (physical features, including scars, marks,
and tatoos; demographic, family, educational, occupational factors;
drug abuse history, and the like);
- addresses, phone numbers;
- relatives and known associates (and their characteristics, as known,
ideally as other persons in the database);
- gang or other relevant group affiliations;
- criminal history (including offenses charged on arrests or cited on
arrest warrants);
- modus operandi in past offenses, sufficiently detailed to
enable useful screening;
- incarceration, release, and parole status;
- vehicles;
- warrant status, state and national, as well as local.
This task, should it fall to the crime analyst, can take either or both of two basic formats: in-coming or out- going surveys. Depending on the size of the jurisdiction and the department, questionnaire surveys may arrive on someone's desk at frequent intervals, as likely as not on that of someone capable of having the task turned over to the "stats people" in crime analysis (if the request avoids the "round filing cabinet," that is). Such surveys range from the requirements of funding agencies through local officials seeking grants (for which police data are deemed essential) to college students doing term papers. If the crime analysis office resides "downhill" within the department, and if undesirable tasks roll downhill, then the implications are clear, and time spent on such matters is not always minimal. All-too-frequently the questions are framed in manner which matches poorly with the structure of the data available, necessitating a wide variety of headaches for the analyst.
But if in-coming surveys can be a nuisance, out-going surveys, whether devised by the department for whatever reason, or through broader municipal enterprises requiring police participation, can be extremely demanding on the limited resources of crime analysis.
Finally there comes the inevitable list of odds and ends functions which the crime analyst might be called upon to perform. Not always about crimes or involving analytical methods, tasks along the lines of the following may nevertheless be very helpful to someone or some division within the department. In most cases the product would be a listing, a simple count, a map, or a specially formatted summary report.
- locations of traffic accidents (e.g., for traffic engineering studies), a likely candidate for GIS map format;
- persons with outstanding arrest warrants, organized by patrol beat, with special lists of juvenile warrants, "most wanted" persons, or warrants for domestic violence or restraining order violations;
- persons arrested, possibly with parameters such as gender, juvenile status, or the like;
- missing persons;
- false burglar alarms (for billing purposes);
- traffic citations;
- stolen property, found and unclaimed property;
- pawned property (from local pawn shops, for matching with stolen property);
- domestic violence incidents, restraining orders, and related matters;
Clearly, functions such as these pull the analyst outward along the continuum of relative breadth of concern. Arguably, they constitute matters of data management and retrieval rather than crime analysis, and may not be seen by all as appropriate to the role of the analyst.
Some other possible functions of the crime analyst, even if they are not crime analysis functions, and even if a strong argument can be made that their inclusion involves a misconceptualization:
- Compstat:
- Community Policing (or "Problem-Oriented Policing" and the like):
Again, a venue, not a function. The analyst provides information to police officers in support of their community policing activities.
- Public Information:
Logically, the role of the crime analyst in compstat is to provide properly formatted results of the analytical process to police officials who conduct the compstat process itself. Thus, compstat is not a function of the analyst but a venue for the work of the crime analyst.
The crime analyst may play part of the role of providing information to the public, whether it be through printed reports, a web site, regular interaction with the press, or other means. Such a role requires that the analyst maintain a broad, comprehensive overview of matters of possible interest to the public, and especially that there be adequate capacity to be "up to speed" or capable of catching up quickly when newsworthy events occur. Of obvious importance are the relationships of the crime analysis office to the departmental command structure.
There may be yet other functions of crime analysis not here described, and it is almost surely true that there are other roles that crime analysts perform for their departments. In all likelihood a not inconsiderable number of analysts are called upon to carry out functions that are not crime analysis at all; examples might be background checks and tasks pertaining to departmental accreditation. Moreover, some of the functions described above may be argued to fall into this category.
Also, there are certain tasks which do not qualify as departmental functions but which are necessary in support of crime analysis, such as those pertaining to administration of the unit, including training, communications, professional association, and the like, as well as day-to-day matters of personnel administration, budgeting, and job oversight. Some time must be devoted to such matters even in a "one-man-band" crime analysis shop.
Seldom is there enough time or staff resources in the crime analysis
unit to perform all the functions that have been described here, at
least not with adequate attention to detail and follow-through. Thus,
it is likely to come down to a matter of setting priorities and managing
one's time effectively. In addition to the analyst's preferences for some
functions over others, there remains the question of the relationship of
the jobs done to support garnered for the unit within the department.
Some functions may be very important to someone whose support is, or may
be in the future, of value to the unit, despite being of little interest
to anyone else and perhaps not highly ranked among the analyst's
priorities. Ultimately, critical support at key locations within the
police department for crime analysis functions, and thus for the unit,
trumps the analyst's preference for other priorities.
Crime Analysts' Round Table, Spring 2001