Perhaps imagination and reality don't appear to mix. What does imagination have to do with the work of the crime and intelligence analyst in "the state of things as they actually exist"?
Imagination can allow us to see possibilities in data. Most of the methods we use in policing were "invented" before digitized data became so easily accessed (well, maybe still not in policing) within and outside of the world of policing. Very little is written about the possibilities of using this data in new ways.
I am not referring to the very good evolution of crime mapping (more often in universities than in actual police departments) and its creative use of data. I am suggesting that we look at data and ask such questions as:
What new things can I learn with this information?
What if I can analyze the data rather than store it?
How might I combine this information to produce new insights?
What if I took this data and analyzed it with that data?
What ways can I learn from other disciplines regarding using data in innovative ways?
What if I analyzed drug markets like a marketing expert analyzes retail markets?
What types of things should I be pro-actively searching for in data?
What if I tracked all sex crimes with unknown assailants and combined the information with investigative file information for a thorough, ongoing analysis?
How do I prioritize what I search for?
What if I analyze the wrong things?
What things are most common?
What if common crimes become serial crimes?
What things are most unusual?
What if an unusual crime will lead to more such crimes?
How can we collect better data for sharing?
What if we could share queries rather than data?
Do the collectors know what to collect?
What if I tell the agency what other data I need?
Imagination leads us to "what if" questions.
What if we could collate information on all our most serious chronic offenders and share everything we know in a centralized database - and distribute the information to line-level officers?
What if we took all available data (police, open source, government, health, school, community, business) regarding a chronic crime problem area and created a holistic problem-solving strategy? (When I was a crime analyst, I noted that the hots spots for domestic violence 911 calls were the hot spots for drug-related 911 calls - what if we did something with that information?)
What if we knew many or all organized crime groups had some sort of nexus with ports - could designing strategies that concentrate resources at ports make a difference? Could we decide to study the groups better by having a presence at ports to gather intelligence?
What if? That is where imagination comes in.
What if?
In the next two days I will write more about imagining as a way to improve the work of analysis.
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