Last week I wrote about the importance of anticipating questions and preparing for these questions by gathering the data you will need to answer them much more easily. Most analysts spend hours upon hours doing ad hoc queries in a reactive mode rather than a responsive mode. What do I mean by that? Reactive analysts get requests and have specific duties and they carry out the activities to fulfill the requests and the duties. Responsive analysts anticipate questions (by learning what is needed) and design what they will need in the future to be prepared for demands. They use creativity and intellect to invent new ways of working better. They work smarter, not harder. They seek to discover something worthwhile and unknown in their data.
To give an example of a real world problem involving responding rather than reacting, let's consider the issue of shootings in a city.
How many shootings are there in your city? (Small town analysts will have to imagine working in a mid to big sized city for this exercise.) Sounds like a simple question, but it isn't.
What does the question mean? How many persons were shot? How many persons were the victims of shooting homicides? How many 911 shots-fired calls were there? How many shootings total, including homicides, persons injured by a gun (actually shot - not a victim of an assault by gun which does NOT have to be a shooting), how many vehicles were shot, how many houses were shot, how many incidents were evidence of shots fired were reported (bullet casings found), etc.
If you are an analyst tracking shootings - and all cities should have someone tracking and analyzing this type of event - you need to track everything. Despite the fact the request might be how many persons were shot in your city, the real problem of shooting, the REAL question regarding shooting, is: where do we know guns are being fired in the city? Common sense tells us that if we take all the information we can gather about shootings in a city, we will have the most accurate portrait of violence involving gunfire possible.
This will not mean that you should give all this information for every request involving shootings, but that you should know all the answers so that you can answer all the POTENTIAL questions surrounding this very significant problem. Beyond that, you should be able to provide an in-depth analysis of this problem and give it to relevant decision-makers - with your analysis of hot spots, significant times of day-days of week, repeat victims and suspects, known gang activity with shootings, the correlation of shootings with drug activity and other things you are tracking, specific problem locations such as bars or parks, etc.
Use the excel spreadsheet method to create a workbook called "Shootings" and create worksheets for each of the following categories.
Shooting Homicides
Persons Shot
Other Shootings (houses, cars, signs, casings found, etc.)
911 Shots Fired Calls
To assess the gun problem in your city more thoroughly, track the following categories:
All Other 911 Gun-related Calls
Stolen Firearms
Recovered Firearms
Arrest for Firearms Possession
Robberies with Firearms
Assaults with Firearms
If you want to track all the gun information, call your Excel workbook "Firearms" or something similar that works for you.
Next week I will provide you an example of a "Firearms" workbook.
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
LeadsOnline
LeadsOnline is a resource to track pawnshop data that was recommended to me as being quite valuable for investigations. I know that when I was a working analyst I would have found it very helpful in property crime analysis. Check it out.
Police Seek Comments on ‘Ring of Steel’ Data
Police Seek Comments on ‘Ring of Steel’ Data
This is an interesting concept regarding data collection by the NYPD in Manhattan - they are inviting public input. Thanks Debra Piehl for sharing this.
This is an interesting concept regarding data collection by the NYPD in Manhattan - they are inviting public input. Thanks Debra Piehl for sharing this.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Policing Terrorism in the United States: The Los Angeles Police Department's Convergence Strategy
Policing Terrorism in the United States: The Los Angeles Police Department's Convergence Strategy, by Michael P. Downing, Deputy Chief and Commanding Officer, Counter-Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau, Los Angeles, California, Police Department, is an article worth reading. Thank you, Jerry Ratcliffe, for bringing it to my attention. I welcome readers to send good links to me.
(My students in my Crime and Intelligence Analysis class should read this article)
(My students in my Crime and Intelligence Analysis class should read this article)
Friday, February 20, 2009
The MO Project - Lesson One
As promised, this is the first "lesson" in tracking MOs in crime patterns for working analysts. Those of you who are not working analysts may want to follow along to learn more about the work of crime analysis.
The purpose of this method of tracking is to anticipate questions and gather the answers before you need them. If you can do that, your future work will be much easier. The more experienced you are as an analyst, the more likely you will know what sorts of questions you might be asked in the future - you will understand the reasoning behind collecting so much data. Next week I will discuss the concept of anticipating questions more thoroughly.
Here is the introductory "workbook" from Google documents. It is not Excel and is thus somewhat limited. There are 3 worksheets. The first illustrates how easy it is to set up a worksheet to track crimes. The second provides you with relevant crimes to track - one workbook (not worksheet) for each. Create a folder called "Tracker" on your computer and create these workbooks to store inside the folder. Organization is KEY. The third gives you ideas for extracting data from your RMS if you have a good system, so that much of this process will simply be copy and paste for you (the lucky analysts).
You can and should track other crimes relevant to your jurisdiction. Do not be intimidated by the quantity of crimes tracked. Trust me - it will pay off!
To use this tracking method, you must enter data daily into Excel workbooks that you have pre-designed. Excel works better than Access because you can add fields more easily and share data more easily (as you will learn in future lessons.) Excel allows the process to be more dynamic and adaptable as you find new ways of your own to make the data work for you. The daily collection process will appear time-consuming, but ultimately will be time-saving and effective for identifying emerging crime aeries and trends, as well as potential suspects.
If you prefer not to do this daily, you can schedule different crimes to collect on various days of the week. I found that doing this first thing in the morning often helped me decide where to focus my energy the rest of the day. You can even do this once a week, but if you do so, you will lose track of urgent matters that will be discovered in the process of data collection, collation, and organization.
If you have to type in all the data yourself (if you do not have crime report narratives to copy) then you must be succinct in collecting the most important data.
This is Lesson One! Use the comment section below this post if you have questions. (But I will be away at Mardis Gras so be patient if it takes me time to respond - my responses also will be in the comment section below.)
All the information collected in the type of work addressed by the "lessons" is already known by a police department and the criminal justice system somewhere in the process of answering 911 calls, collecting crime report data, in legitimate investigations, as well as in parole and probation records - this is a method of gathering it in one place for more effective analysis. (It is legal and does not infringe on civil rights.)
The purpose of this method of tracking is to anticipate questions and gather the answers before you need them. If you can do that, your future work will be much easier. The more experienced you are as an analyst, the more likely you will know what sorts of questions you might be asked in the future - you will understand the reasoning behind collecting so much data. Next week I will discuss the concept of anticipating questions more thoroughly.
Here is the introductory "workbook" from Google documents. It is not Excel and is thus somewhat limited. There are 3 worksheets. The first illustrates how easy it is to set up a worksheet to track crimes. The second provides you with relevant crimes to track - one workbook (not worksheet) for each. Create a folder called "Tracker" on your computer and create these workbooks to store inside the folder. Organization is KEY. The third gives you ideas for extracting data from your RMS if you have a good system, so that much of this process will simply be copy and paste for you (the lucky analysts).
You can and should track other crimes relevant to your jurisdiction. Do not be intimidated by the quantity of crimes tracked. Trust me - it will pay off!
To use this tracking method, you must enter data daily into Excel workbooks that you have pre-designed. Excel works better than Access because you can add fields more easily and share data more easily (as you will learn in future lessons.) Excel allows the process to be more dynamic and adaptable as you find new ways of your own to make the data work for you. The daily collection process will appear time-consuming, but ultimately will be time-saving and effective for identifying emerging crime aeries and trends, as well as potential suspects.
If you prefer not to do this daily, you can schedule different crimes to collect on various days of the week. I found that doing this first thing in the morning often helped me decide where to focus my energy the rest of the day. You can even do this once a week, but if you do so, you will lose track of urgent matters that will be discovered in the process of data collection, collation, and organization.
If you have to type in all the data yourself (if you do not have crime report narratives to copy) then you must be succinct in collecting the most important data.
This is Lesson One! Use the comment section below this post if you have questions. (But I will be away at Mardis Gras so be patient if it takes me time to respond - my responses also will be in the comment section below.)
All the information collected in the type of work addressed by the "lessons" is already known by a police department and the criminal justice system somewhere in the process of answering 911 calls, collecting crime report data, in legitimate investigations, as well as in parole and probation records - this is a method of gathering it in one place for more effective analysis. (It is legal and does not infringe on civil rights.)
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Tracking Crime Patterns and MOs
Due to requests from a post I made on the International Association of Crime Analysts listerv on a system/method to track crime patterns and MOs, I have decided to post a sort of "training" over the next few months every Friday on this blog the topic as described in my IACA post:
"I used to keep all my pattern-type crimes in excel workbooks, a workbook for each type and subtype.
For example, I would have all the data I could collect on pizza delivery robberies (and other delivery type robberies) in one workbook. I would organized it so that it was easy to copy and paste the data fields needed for mapping. I would also collect info on the individuals arrested for such crimes on another sheet in the workbook with details about MO. I could then put together an intelligence product about people involved in specific types of crimes, such as sale of laptops that were actually not laptops, but boxes made to look like they contained laptops, or copper thieves - whatever. I did not come up with this method until later in my 10 years at the Buffalo PD, but it certainly was a great asset to early identification of patterns/series and helped me not have to do the same queries over and over again - I didn't have to remember to query - I would add to the pattern files daily and then I could see patterns. I could also back-fill patterns when I wasn't as busy - say, look up multiple years worth of old bank robberies and fill the workbook that contained bank robberies with that info to create depth.
Some crimes went into multiple categories - so I just copied and pasted - say, a crime with a masked suspect (into the disguise workbook) who committed a home invasion robbery (into the home invasion workbook) and targeted elderly victims (into the elderly victim workbook).
Now, analysts need to note that what a person was convicted of might not be the original crime due to plea bargaining. There are many challenges to tracking by MO and I think we do very poorly at developing systematic, logical methods. Considering that 6% of the criminals commit 60% or so of the crime, that is a crime! Visit Analysts' Corner on Fridays if you what to find out more information and see examples - I will use Google document spreadsheets and other tools to describe this in detail.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Practical Wisdom
About this talk
"Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world."
I would suggest that the multitude of bureaucratic obstacles that interfere in progress in policing have something to do with the lack of what is called "practical wisdom" in this talk.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Law enforcement Intelligence-led policing puts Saint John force on cutting edge
Law enforcement Intelligence-led policing puts Saint John force on cutting edge.
I like the focus on crime reduction presented in this article. That is the essence of ILP.
I like the focus on crime reduction presented in this article. That is the essence of ILP.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Intelligence lab tests best practices, emerging concepts
Intelligence lab tests best practices, emerging concepts
"New capabilities at U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Intelligence Laboratory will allow intelligence personnel the opportunity to experience information in a realistic three-dimensonal environment." Read more...
"New capabilities at U.S. Joint Forces Command's Joint Intelligence Laboratory will allow intelligence personnel the opportunity to experience information in a realistic three-dimensonal environment." Read more...
Sunday, February 8, 2009
2009 National Gang Threat Assessment
2009 National Gang Threat Assessment is available online.
Excerpt:
"Key Findings
The following key findings were developed by analysis of available federal, state, and local law enforcement information; 2008 National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) National Drug Threat Survey (NDTS) data; and verified open source information:
• Approximately 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia as of September 2008.
• Local street gangs, or neighborhood-based street gangs, remain a significant threat because they continue to account for the largest number of gangs nationwide. Most engage in violence in conjunction with a variety of crimes, including retail-level drug distribution.
• According to NDTS data, 58 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that criminal gangs were active in their jurisdictions in 2008 compared with 45 percent of state and local agencies in 2004.
• Gang members are migrating from urban areas to suburban and rural communities, expanding the gangs’ influence in most regions; they are doing so for a variety of reasons, including expanding drug distribution territories, increasing illicit revenue, recruiting new members, hiding from law enforcement, and escaping other gangs. Many suburban and rural communities are experiencing increasing gang-related crime and violence because of expanding gang influence.
• Criminal gangs commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities, according to law enforcement officials throughout the nation. Typical gang-related crimes include alien smuggling, armed robbery, assault, auto theft, drug trafficking, extortion, fraud, home invasions, identity theft, murder, and weapons trafficking.
• Gang members are the primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs. They also are increasingly distributing wholesale-level quantities of marijuana and cocaine in most urban and suburban communities.
• Some gangs traffic illicit drugs at the regional and national levels; several are capable of competing with U.S.-based Mexican DTOs.
• U.S.-based gang members illegally cross the U.S.–Mexico border for the express purpose of smuggling illicit drugs and illegal aliens from Mexico into the United States.
• Many gangs actively use the Internet to recruit new members and to communicate with members in other areas of the United States and in foreign countries.
• Street gangs and outlaw motorcycle gangs pose a growing threat to law enforcement along the U.S.– Canada border. They frequently associate with Canada-based gangs and criminal organizations to facilitate various criminal activities, including drug smuggling into the United States."
Excerpt:
"Key Findings
The following key findings were developed by analysis of available federal, state, and local law enforcement information; 2008 National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) National Drug Threat Survey (NDTS) data; and verified open source information:
• Approximately 1 million gang members belonging to more than 20,000 gangs were criminally active within all 50 states and the District of Columbia as of September 2008.
• Local street gangs, or neighborhood-based street gangs, remain a significant threat because they continue to account for the largest number of gangs nationwide. Most engage in violence in conjunction with a variety of crimes, including retail-level drug distribution.
• According to NDTS data, 58 percent of state and local law enforcement agencies reported that criminal gangs were active in their jurisdictions in 2008 compared with 45 percent of state and local agencies in 2004.
• Gang members are migrating from urban areas to suburban and rural communities, expanding the gangs’ influence in most regions; they are doing so for a variety of reasons, including expanding drug distribution territories, increasing illicit revenue, recruiting new members, hiding from law enforcement, and escaping other gangs. Many suburban and rural communities are experiencing increasing gang-related crime and violence because of expanding gang influence.
• Criminal gangs commit as much as 80 percent of the crime in many communities, according to law enforcement officials throughout the nation. Typical gang-related crimes include alien smuggling, armed robbery, assault, auto theft, drug trafficking, extortion, fraud, home invasions, identity theft, murder, and weapons trafficking.
• Gang members are the primary retail-level distributors of most illicit drugs. They also are increasingly distributing wholesale-level quantities of marijuana and cocaine in most urban and suburban communities.
• Some gangs traffic illicit drugs at the regional and national levels; several are capable of competing with U.S.-based Mexican DTOs.
• U.S.-based gang members illegally cross the U.S.–Mexico border for the express purpose of smuggling illicit drugs and illegal aliens from Mexico into the United States.
• Many gangs actively use the Internet to recruit new members and to communicate with members in other areas of the United States and in foreign countries.
• Street gangs and outlaw motorcycle gangs pose a growing threat to law enforcement along the U.S.– Canada border. They frequently associate with Canada-based gangs and criminal organizations to facilitate various criminal activities, including drug smuggling into the United States."
Cracking the case: ‘DOMEX’ system is tool used to analyze crime
Cracking the case: ‘DOMEX’ system is tool used to analyze crime is an interesting and informative article.
Friday, February 6, 2009
SafeGowth
SafeGrowth is a new blog:
"Welcome to the SafeGrowth blog. If you are interested in, or working on, neighborhood safety, community development, or crime prevention, this blog is for you. Posts will highlight current trends in how to turn troubled communities back from the brink of crime."
Check it out!
"Welcome to the SafeGrowth blog. If you are interested in, or working on, neighborhood safety, community development, or crime prevention, this blog is for you. Posts will highlight current trends in how to turn troubled communities back from the brink of crime."
Check it out!
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