#1 Lessons From My Story

I will post a "lesson" from my life as an analyst once a week until I run out of them! Skip over these if they don't interest you. For those who read on, consider the power of your own stories and where they might take you. And if you want to follow these post threads, in the future click on the label "my story."

How It Started: #1 Lessons From My Story

On a lovely autumn day in Buffalo (we do have them), my sister showed me a civil service job announcement for the City of Buffalo for the position of Crime Analyst. At that time, she was working for the city and I was working for New York State as a Habilitation Specialist, on a behavioral intervention team that helped the families and caregivers of developmentally disabled individuals of all ages - individuals who had "behavior problems." It was a psychology position wherein I analyzed behaviors and developed plans to hopefully improve the difficult-to-change behaviors. The treatment plans I designed always included very simple statistics and ratios, and often integrated visualization charts for the clients who could not read.

Would I qualify to take the civil service test to become a crime analyst? Somehow I did. And lucky me, because my sister and I shared a love of Agatha Christie novels, she shared the notice of the test; we both thought "crime analyst" sounded quite interesting. I though maybe I could use my grey cells to detect like Hercule Poirot.

Needless to say, I scored high on the exam and qualified for an interview, then I was able to persuade those who interviewed me for the crime analyst position that indeed crime was a behavior and I was good at analyzing behavior. I had NO computer skills and no criminal justice background.

So what is the lesson? Go for it! If you want to be a crime analyst and you are not from the traditional job-seekers' criminal justice educational credentials and/or with law enforcement experience, this does not mean you will not make a good crime analyst. It may be more difficult to get the position, but if you have any chance at all - take it!

The other lesson is this: if you want to hire a good crime analyst, keep an open mind and consider hiring the person who has not followed the common trajectory into the job.

While my story is my own subjective experience, I have other information to support my story lessons in this post. For my book, Out of Bounds: Innovation and Change In Law Enforcement Intelligence Analysis, I interviewed 52 persons, mainly law enforcement analysts, but including some experts in law enforcement analysis who were not practicing analysts.

Many of these persons did not have a criminal justice educational backgrounds, yet they were successful analyst practitioners. The variety of their educational backgrounds are listed in the book on page 26 - I have listed them below for your consideration. Note the wide variety!

Educational Background of Interview Subjects:

Accounting
Anthropology
Biology
Business Administration
Chemistry
Computer Science
Criminal Justice
Criminology
Economics
Education
Engineering
English
Human Resources
Geographic Information Systems
Geography
Government Administration
History
Journalism
Law Enforcement
Library Science
Management
Marketing
Mass Communications
Mathematics
Political Science
Psychology
Public Administration
Public Policy
Sociology
Theology
Urban Planning
Vocational Education