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.
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