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.