Definition
Crime analysis is the collection and manipulation of crime-related information and data to discern patterns within that data with the goal of predicting, understanding, or empirically explaining crime and criminality, evaluating justice agency performance, or creating tactical and strategic deployment for criminal justice personnel. Although crime analysis has become more regularly used by police agencies, its development and utility can be found in other criminal justice agencies, as well as among the work of social scientists particularly in the field of criminology, who have used multiple crime analytic approaches to study crime and to assist police agencies. Each concept within this definition is explored next.
Information and Data Collection
Crime analysis begins with collecting information to analyze. While this first step to any type of analysis might seem obvious, accurate and useful crime analysis depends on the quality and sometimes the quantity of information that is gathered. Locating and collecting information to be analyzed is therefore an essential and often time-consuming starting point for crime analysis. Further, because crime analysis involves discerning patterns from large amounts of seemingly disparate pieces of information, computerized and automated forms of data can be a convenient and abundant source of data.
The most commonly used forms of computerized information collected for the purposes of analyzing crime are police calls for service or 911 calls, computerized records of written police reports, and computerized records of arrest. These three sources are most widely used by police analysts and criminologists when attempting to discern crime patterns, predict criminality, or develop crime prevention schemes.
Calls for Service
Computerized calls for service are generated each time a citizen calls the police for assistance or when the police proactively generate enforcement activity. Information is often collected by a computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system and can include the date, time, location, and type of call as the citizen or dispatcher interprets it. Calls-for-service information databases usually contain large amounts of records because they are generated each time an individual calls for police, fire, or ambulance service. For large cities, the number is often hundreds of thousands of records per year. Thus, calls-for-service information confounds analysis because these data can be repetitive, represent false calls, and include crimes that are misrepresented by citizens or are not crime related.
In addition to these problems, calls-for-service information also contains systematic errors that are generated by emergency personnel who initially record the data. These include multiple data entrants who use different styles and abbreviations when entering data, spelling errors, or purposely created errors, which may be generated according to unwritten rules of the police service. For example, homicides are often not found in calls-for-service databases because dispatchers and responding officers are specifically ordered not to label or announce an incident a homicide until deemed so by a detective.
However, given these limitations, calls for service are often a useful source of information when conducting crime analysis. For example, a number of crime-related incidents are found in calls for service that are not found in other data sources, which may provide police departments with a better understanding of crime in a particular neighborhood. These may include calls about disorder and quality-of-life incidents, ranging from noise complaints and public drunkenness to drug use and distribution, prostitution, street gambling, or fighting. Many of these crimes are either ”victimless” (or go unreported by participants) or may not be formally recorded into a police report once the police respond. Yet, these incidents provide analysts with a better understanding of crime and disorder in a city or neighborhood, and can help direct deployment efforts.
Computerized Records of Written Reports
Another widely used source of information for crime analysis is computerized databases of written reports. These computerized records usually begin as manually written, paper forms that police personnel fill out in the field. Recently, some police departments have adopted computerized systems in which reports are automatically entered into a computerized database. Manually written reports may later be entered into an automated information system by other personnel, and the entire population of crime incident reports over a particular time period may then be downloaded by crime analysts.
Computerized records of written reports have been viewed as useful to analysts and researchers alike because they represent a filter of incidents that may be recorded in the calls-for-service database that are not crime related, are duplicate calls, or have other systematic errors and misrepresentations. At the same time, police culture, departmental practices, and the personal styles of individual officers and detectives will also create systematic biases and errors as to the types of incidents in which a report is written. Usually, when police respond to more serious crimes, this increases the likelihood that an incident report will be written. Because of this, computerized records of written reports vastly underreport disorder and quality-of-life incidents or may only be generated if an arrest is made (for example, a report related to drug dealing).
However, computerized records of written reports are a rich data source for crime analysis because more information is often collected in these records compared to the information collected in calls-for-service databases. For example, not only are the date, time, and location of the incident collected (and perhaps more accurately than the date, time, and location of when and where a call for service was generated), but more specific information about the crime incident may also be recorded. These specifics may include whether a weapon was used, what type of building the crime took place in, what relation, if any, was the suspect to the victim; in some cases, the entire narrative of the report may be entered into the computer database. All of this information might be used in crime analysis to gain a better understanding of crime patterns and to assist with future predictions about where, when, how, or why crime will occur.
Computerized Records of Arrest Reports
Crime analysis has also been commonly conducted on computerized records of arrest reports. In some cases, the arrest report and the incident report may be the same report, or the arrest information may be added to the incident database as additional information connected to a specific incident. Computerized records of arrest can be especially useful to analysts in ascertaining who the repeat offenders are in a particular community, evaluating officer productivity, or examining co-offending. However, because a large percentage of crimes do not result in arrest, arrest records can also be less useful for certain types of crime analysis (for example, in determining ”hot spots” of criminal activity).
Other Information Sources
The sources of information collected and used for crime analysis, however, are not limited to computerized records of calls for service, written reports, or arrest. In addition to these three primary sources of information, crime analysis is conducted on a wide variety of data sources depending on the goals of the analyses. For example, information may be garnered for crime analysis from these sources:
• Surveys of residents in a community
• Information about the modus operandi for a set of crimes
• Sentencing dispositions and other court records
• Self-reports of victimization or offending
• Ethnographic observations
• Police officer daily written logs of minute-by-minute activities (”run sheets”)
• Detective case folders
• Parole and probation case folders
• Police personnel files
• Ad hoc databases generated by specialized units
• Field interview cards
• Data collected by evidence-submission units
• Traffic citations or accident reports
• Pawnshop tickets
• Surveys of police personnel
• Census, demographic, economic, or land use information
Information Manipulation and Analysis
Once data and information have been collected, crime analysis involves the manipulation of that data toward some goal. The term manipulation is used here to connote a wide variety of approaches in which data can be aggregated, combined, reshaped, related, reordered, or transformed in order to ascertain patterns within the data. The manipulation of collected information may involve a number of steps that make up the ”analysis.”
First, information may need to be prepared, ”cleaned,” extracted, or made into a form that can be analyzed because of aforementioned errors within the data. Raw intelligence may need to be coded and entered into a computerized system in order to systematically analyze it. Or, as already mentioned, data entrants of computerized crime information may make a number of systematic and nonsys-tematic errors that need to be fixed in order for analysis to continue. Often, data entrants are not entering crime data with the goal that such information will be analyzed in the future, which further confounds the standardization of the data. For example, in geographic crime analysis, computerized records of the locations of crimes are digitally mapped to determine clusters of crime for deployment purposes. If addresses are misspelled or include more information (for example, an apartment number) than a geographic information system can interpret, the crime cannot be digitally mapped. Further, if data entrants or field officers use and record common names for a particular location (for example, ”Central Park”) repeatedly for multiple crimes, entire groups of records may never be digitally mapped if a geographic information system does not understand where ”Central Park” is. The systematic correction or ”cleaning” of addresses is a fundamental and time-consuming job of crime analysts who conduct geographic crime analysis.
Once information has been cleaned or standardized, data manipulation and analysis can utilize a range of descriptive, statistical, qualitative, econometric, and/or geographic tools depending on the purpose of analysis, the skills of the analyst, and the data extraction and analytic tools that are available. Examples of data manipulations that have been conducted include the following:
• Geographic ”hot spot” analysis, in which a geographic information system is used to create computerized maps of the locations of different types of crime incidents to ascertain clustering of these incidents
• Descriptive temporal analysis to determine the most likely times of the day or year in which crime will occur
• Statistical comparison methods to analyze data from randomized controlled experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular crime prevention strategy that the police want to implement
• The use of time series analysis to determine the effects of a police after-school program on juvenile delinquency or the effects of a police deployment against terrorism
• Measures of productivity of police officers or supervisors (for example, examining changes in crime rates over time in a particular officer’s beat) to evaluate officer performance
• The analysis of long-term crime trends across a neighborhood, city, state, nation, or world region, to determine the development of crime and its possible relationship with police activity or other social and economic trends
• The analysis of modus operandi of a group of crimes to determine patterns or commonalities for purposes of investigation
• The drawing of patterns from qualitative surveys of residents or ethnographies to better understand a community’s concerns about crime.
• Surveys can be used to gauge officer satisfaction with their jobs or the level of brutality in a police department
• Statistical analyses of field interviews or traffic tickets to determine if police are racially profiling individuals
• Analysis of police activity logs to determine the productivity of certain officers or to monitor corruption
• Determining the major streets and pathways between locations of stolen automobiles and locations in which they are recovered to set up tactical or covert checkpoints of stolen automobiles
• The analysis of the price or purity of cocaine or crack sold on the street to determine trends of international drug trafficking
Purposes and Goals of Crime Analysis
The wide variety of analyses given in the preceding examples emphasizes that crime analysis does not point to any specific set of analytic tools, systems, or information sources. The only constraining factors that might determine what type of analysis is conducted is the availability of data, the purpose for which it was collected, or the analytic abilities of the crime analyst. For example, qualitative ethnographic observation data might require triangulation analysis or the use of software developed specifically to determine patterns in narratives. One might use logistic regression to determine what factors contribute to whether or not an individual is likely to be rearrested after his or her first domestic violence assault (for use by repeat offender units). Spatial statistical software might be utilized to determine whether drug events in a particular neighborhood exhibit any statistically significant clustering. Geographic information systems might be used to map the locations of robberies in a city. Link/network analysis can help to analyze organized crime networks, gang affiliations, and co-offending. Analysis can also incorporate noncrime data as well, to determine correlates to crime patterns or crime problems or to explore alternative answers to initial questions and hypotheses.
Thus, crime analysis is not limited to a certain set of tools, data, or perspectives.
Like any police investigation, crime analysis requires the exploration of multiple sources, views, and manipulations of data in order to reach a particular goal or purpose. Although crime analysis may have a number of goals, these can be generalized under the following four categories:
1. To understand and predict. One of the primary, if not central purposes of crime analysis is to ascertain patterns from information with the goal of understanding crime phenomena or to make predictions about crime patterns. Spatial, temporal, behavioral, and correlational patterns provide analysts with a better understanding of what types of crime might occur in the future, as well as when, how, where, and why they might occur. Common questions in crime analysis might include these: Which offenders are responsible for committing a large proportion of crimes? Where are crimes occurring? Why are these crimes occurring? What environmental factors are influencing crime occurrence? How are these crimes related? Which officers are at higher risk for health problems or corruption? Which areas of a city are most prone to terrorist or drug activity?
2. To strategize and deploy. Police are concerned with predicting and understanding crime patterns, often with the explicit goal of determining how to prevent crime in the future through strategic and tactical deployment schemes. Crime analysis may be conducted to create cluster maps of the locations of crimes to direct general preventive patrol efforts. Information from arrest or incident records can be analyzed to determine where an individual might be hiding or how best to apprehend someone. Or officer run sheets may be analyzed to detect corruption or laziness so that internal investigations might be generated.
Analysis might be used for both short-run, immediate deployment actions (sometimes referred to as ”tactical” crime analysis) and more long-run strategies (”strategic” crime analysis). Tactical crime analysis is conducted on short time periods, perhaps examining crime incidents in a specific location over a week or month. Additionally, this type of analysis is conducted to obtain an up-to-date understanding of specific types of crime patterns in order to better inform a current police operation. While the use of crime analysis for tactical deployment may seem logical, this is a new and recent development for police agencies. Law enforcement agencies have evolved into reactive, calls-for-service-driven organizations in which officers and detectives respond to requests on an individual, case-by-case basis. Tactical deployment is rarely based on analysis of past information, but rather on tradition, ”experience,” hunches, what officers did in the past, or on ”common sense.” The use of tactical crime analysis stands in sharp contrast to these approaches. Tactical crime analysis uses information and intelligence to inform decision making, and groups past crimes together to discern patterns in order to take a proactive and preventive approach to dealing with a current crime problem. Strategic crime analysis is conducted for the purposes of long-run police planning (perhaps to create a yearly plan of action). Although strategic and tactical analyses have a number of overlapping goals and applications, strategic crime analysis may examine long-run crime trends in a particular city, or can be used to allocate personnel or finances for an upcoming year. At its most basic level, strategic crime analysis is the collection of crime information for the purposes of collecting descriptive statistics on yearly crime data (for example, for the Uniformed Crime Reports collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation). However, strategic crime analysis can also include time series analysis of the effects of major changes in general policing strategies (for example, patrol or investigations strategies) across multiple months or understanding crime displacement and geographic shifts across a city after a change in the physical or social environment of that city.
3. To evaluate the effectiveness of police deployment schemes. Crime analysis is also used in policing to evaluate the effects of police tactics and strategies. Crime statistics, experiments, and maps can provide useful ways for police to see whether their efforts are having any discernible effect on crime, criminality, disorder, or quality of life. This type of analysis is a subset of evaluation research, often conducted by social scientists to examine the effects of social programs on a particular problem. A wide variety of evaluation techniques are available to crime analysts conducting evaluations including randomized controlled experiments, quasi-experiments, time series analysis, statistical regression analysis, or the examination of satisfaction interviews. As with any type of analysis, evaluation methods are not created equal; some analytic methods are considered more accurate than others and thus are more reliable when making decisions about what police deployment schemes work.
4. To evaluate the performance of police personnel. Along similar lines of evaluating the effectiveness of police deployment is evaluating the performance of police personnel. For example, the New York City Police Department’s COMPSTAT strategy is an explicit effort to use analytic tools including geographic information analysis and descriptive statistics about crime to monitor the efforts of supervisors, detectives, and officers (as well as the performance of other criminal justice agencies, such as probation and parole). Monthly crime statistics (and changes from previous months) are presented by supervising commanders in front of senior command staff and other supervising commanders in monthly administrative meetings. In these COMPSTAT meetings, information is then used by senior command staff to ask officers and commanders to provide reasons why crime has increased or to give reports on what they have done to deal with last month’s crime problems. COMPSTAT has been replicated in a variety of forms across numerous police agencies who utilize crime analysis and statistics to keep track of police productivity.
Is Crime Analysis Useful and Effective?
In general, crime analysis is believed to be a positive policing development because its central function is to facilitate a proactive policing style in both administrative and deployment matters. Traditionally, police have focused on crime (as well as disciplinary issues) on a case-by-case basis, reacting to crime after its occurrence with the goal of arresting the offender. This reactive approach has been increasingly discounted in terms of being useful in reducing crime rates in cities or neighborhoods. As mentioned earlier, analytic results might help to predict the locations of future crime events and/or offenders, which may help police more efficiently target deployment. Crime analysis may also be useful in evaluating the effectiveness of policing strategies and the performance of police officers, thus serving as a way to more directly and strongly supervise officers and motivate them to be diligent.
Although little research is available that directly evaluates whether crime analysis is effective in reducing crime, there is evidence that preventive, proactive policing approaches that rely on crime analysis work better in reducing crime than those that are reactive and address crime incidents on a case-by-case basis. Often, crime analysis is not evaluated because it is seen as a technical aspect of a prevention program rather than the program itself. Yet, the intelligence that is generated by manipulating seemingly separate pieces of information might make deployment more effective, efficient, logical, feasible, or politically acceptable.
An excellent example of where crime analysis has been central to the reduction of crime is in one of the most common uses of crime analysis—hot-spot patrol. Hot-spot patrol, as made most famous by Lawrence Sherman and David Weis-burd’s experiments, is arguably a direct and logical extension of hot-spot crime mapping. However, it is the deployment (that is, hot-spot patrol), not the information or information technology (that is, maps generated by geographic information systems that indicate crime clustering) that is often promoted as achieving the outcome sought (crime reduction). Yet, in hot-spot policing, the generation of maps is a direct part of this deployment strategy. Further, the development of computerized crime mapping as well as hot-spot work conducted by a number of criminologists, social scientists, and crime analysts have helped facilitate the adoption of this deployment innovation.
Three important theoretical developments in policing have provided a foundation and justification for why improving information collection, analysis, processing, and use by police may help improve police deployment effectiveness. These include problem-oriented policing, evidence-based policing, and information-driven management strategies.
Problem-Oriented Policing
Problem-oriented policing was formally introduced by Herman Goldstein in 1979 and represents the first structured framework for incorporating the collection, manipulation, and analysis of crime-related information into an organized police deployment strategy. Problem-oriented policing suggests that police can be more effective when deployment is based on the combination and manipulation of information about multiple incidents rather than separately focusing on individual incidents.
The centrality of crime analysis in problem-oriented policing was well articulated by Eck and Spelman in 1987 when they introduced the acronym SARA to describe the problem-oriented process. Respectively, SARA stands for a problem-oriented process in which police should ”scan” for common crime problems within a community by collecting information from multiple sources (crime and noncrime related) about that community, ”analyze” multiple sources and records of these problems to discern patterns, ”respond” to problems according to the results ofthe analysis, and then ”assess” the effectiveness of the response in reducing the problem.
The problem-oriented policing model suggests that the proactive use of information and analysis in policing to better understand overarching problems is directly connected to police effectiveness and evaluation efforts. Although evidence as to the effectiveness of problem-oriented policing can best be described as moderately strong, the few empirical tests that have been conducted show much promise to the hypothesis that crime analysis can directly help police to reduce crime.
Evidence-Based Policing
Evidence-based policing, as articulated by Lawrence Sherman in 1998, is another foundation for the usefulness and effectiveness of crime analysis in policing. Evidence-based policing refers to the idea that deployment and prevention decisions should be based on strong evidence that a particular police strategy is effective in reducing crime. Program effectiveness is directly determined by evaluation research, a particular type of crime analysis carried out by both criminologists as well as police analysts. Through this type of analysis, effectiveness is determined by collecting information about the outcomes of police prevention programs and then scientifically testing whether these outcomes are linked to the program.
Like problem-oriented policing, evidence-based policing suggests a new perspective with regard to the use of information that goes beyond examining information related to a specific crime for the sole purpose of clearing a case. In evidence-based policing, crime information is combined and analyzed to evaluate programs as well as the productivity of personnel. Thus, it not only contributes to determining better responses in the SARA process, but also emphasizes the need to collect information for the purpose of guiding decisions and assessing effectiveness. Like problem-oriented policing, evidence-based policing also indirectly suggests that improvements in information collection technologies and more scientifically rigorous analysis are important mechanisms in facilitating police effectiveness.
Information-Driven Management Strategies
As already mentioned, police agencies are beginning to use crime analysis as a tool in which to evaluate personnel and carry out strategic meetings to motivate officers and supervisors. While the aforementioned COMPSTAT strategy used by the New York City Police Department has been the most visible manifestation of this administrative use of crime analysis, information-driven management strategies more generally have placed crime analysis at the center of management strategies. These strategies utilize crime maps, crime rate statistics, and other analyzed information on personnel (complaints by citizens, trends of medical leave, analysis of the use of overtime by officers, and so on) to uncover inefficiencies and problems in police behavior. Here, information and analysis are used in an attempt to improve police services, uncover racial profiling, or root out corruption and brutality.
The Realities of Crime Analysis in Police Agencies
These broad definitions, theoretical justifications, and general overviews suggest that crime analysis is a positive, effective development in police agencies. Yet, the realities of the current state of crime analysis suggest a number of challenges and shortcomings. Furthermore, how crime analysis is conducted, who carries out crime analysis, and how analysis might be disseminated and used suffer from a number of myths that should be dispelled. At the time of this entry, these realities are as follows:
1. The types of crime analysis conducted in policing are limited. The types of analyses used in policing have been restricted primarily to descriptive statistics on crime trends per week, month, or year or the compilation of Uniformed Crime Reports (UCR) statistics. Although the use of geographic crime analysis and hot-spot mapping has become more widely diffused in policing, crime analysis continues to be a relatively new innovation. Other types of statistical, qualitative, ethnographic, evaluative, network, or modus operandi analysis are rarely conducted.
2. The use of crime analysis in policing is limited. Not only are the methods and types of analysis used by law enforcement rudimentary in nature, but law enforcement still primarily relies on a reactive, case-by-case mentality in which to tackle crime problems. Often, hunches, officer experience, ”word on the street,” or ”common sense” (however vague the term) are seen as more reliable than other forms of information. Crime analytic units in police agencies are not only small and poorly funded, but are believed by other police personnel, from patrol officers to sometimes the chief executive officer, to have utility only in the collection of UCR statistics or to assist senior supervisors in gathering crime statistics for monthly management meetings. It is rare to find tactical crime analysis being conducted at the precinct or stationhouse level, and there is clearly a gap between the generation of crime analysis and its dissemination as a regular tool in police deployment. More generally, the use of proactive and innovative policing approaches has generally been eschewed by policing culture, which continues to support a reactive, procedure-based approach.
3. Crime analysis is primarily not conducted by crime analysts. It is clear that the vast majority of crime analysis that is conducted is not conducted by crime analysts in police agencies. Rather, researchers doing work in criminology, environmental criminology, criminal justice evaluation, policing, geography, economics, and public policy have been the primary supporters, providers, and facilitators of the crime analysis movement. For example, consultation, research, and pro bono work by environmental and place-based criminologists and geographers have helped facilitate hot-spot analysis and partnerships that have helped develop crime analysis and mapping units in police agencies. Police agencies have partnered with researchers from universities, research foundations, or government agencies to understand crime distributions within a jurisdiction or situational features that may lead to the availability of crime opportunities in a city. Police departments also have received crime analysis training, assistance, and products from academic and other research entities.
Further, crime analysts in police agencies have often been ”one-person shops.” Many crime analysts in police agencies are uniquely innovative individuals who have been identified by chief executive officers as being able to provide (or who can learn very quickly to provide) analytic services to police commanders. Their function, however, still remains ambiguous and they are widely underutilized in terms of tactical or strategic functions. Crime analysts in police agencies often rely on on-the-job training or support from outside individuals; because the use of analysis in policing is relatively new, very little mentorship or apprenticeship is available to train crime analysts in the tools needed for analysis. Recently, police agencies have begun to hire civilians to conduct crime analysis, including students with graduate degrees in criminology, statistics, geography, and computer science.
4. The purpose and function of crime analysis are often misunderstood. Crime analysis is often mistaken for other police functions, including forensics, crime scene processing, or computer-aided dispatch systems by both police personnel and those outside of the police agency. One primary difference between forensics/ crime scene processing and crime analysis is that crime analysis is not conducted on one single incident for the purposes of finding a perpetrator to make an arrest. While this might be one specific goal of a particular type of crime analysis, crime analysis is primarily focused on discerning patterns from multiple pieces of data in order to create prevention programs, tactical or strategic deployment schemes, evaluate officers, or determine the effectiveness of programs. Crime analysis might be used with the goal of arresting an individual by examining multiple crimes that individual is believed to have committed. However, the key difference and discerning characteristic of crime analysis is that it is the analysis of multiple pieces of information, often with proactive goals.
5. Police culture is often suspicious of analysis. It is also clear that crime analysts are seen as outsiders within the police agency. For analysts who work for administrative purposes to evaluate other officers (such as its use in COMPSTAT meetings at the New York City Police Department), crime analysts might be seen along similar lines as detectives in internal affairs units. In many cases, crime analysts are academic researchers volunteering their services to police agencies. This further places the crime analyst at the peripheries of the police service. Police culture continues to be suspicious of any activity that seems academic, proactive, or preventive, and this will be a major obstacle to overcome if crime analysis is to become a regularly used investigative and patrol tool.
Overall, crime analysis is a promising and useful tool for police agencies.
However, it remains to be seen whether proactive approaches that involve the collection and manipulation of multiple sources of information can become incorporated into police practice and culture.
