#3 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."

When you begin working as an analyst in a law enforcement jurisdiction, it will take you years to learn what is "normal" crime - this limits your ability to discern that which is significant in your data sets.

When I began working as a crime analyst in a city dense with crime to analyze, I focused first on robberies. I recently read somewhere legit that 40% of robberies have unknown assailants - and even if that statistic is not exact, I found that paying attention to robberies, looking for robbery series (robberies committed by the same suspect(s)), was fruitful.

I began putting together a newsletter of crimes that I had analyzed in my non-techie, non-database-centered way - primarily in this mode because there were no accessible databases for me to use back then. However, I could review the daily crimes on our Intranet and collect them myself in my own spreadsheets.

One of the first series I identified was related to robberies of delivery truck drivers when they were outside of places making deliveries. There were ten such crimes in one month! Little did I know how irregular that was, because I did not know what was common and what was uncommon when I started. Fortunately, I was developing relationships within the department and a wise old officer who befriended me recognized the modus operandi and shared possible suspect information, which I could then pass on to detectives, along with dates, times, locations, weapons, vehicles, businesses affected, and suspect descriptions.

Lesson: Know your jurisdiction. Make no assumptions, even if you are an experienced analyst who has moved to a new job. You cannot know the norm of your crime until you have spent some time getting intimate with it. This is why hiring consultants or temporary analysts for local level law enforcement analysis is less likely to result in meaningful analysis. You need to build relationships with both the data and the people (social capital) in your agency. You need to be there.

Later, as an analyst at the federal level, working on major investigations, I needed to get familiar with what I was looking for and what mattered to investigators. It is not the same as working at the local level of policing as an analyst, but, similarly, it does take time to learn what matters. Each big case is different. Sometimes you have to learn about crimes that are unfamiliar to you. In my work situation, I had to get more intimate with the nuts and bolts of financial fraud schemes of all sorts. Being an analyst always involves continuous learning. You cannot be an effective analyst if you do not love to learn.

Here are some Problem Oriented Policing Guides to consider:
Analyzing Repeat Victimization
Robbery at Automated Teller Machines
Robbery of Convenience Stores
Robbery of Pharmacies
Robbery of Taxi Drivers