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."
Partnerships with academia and the interns provided by them can help you expand in areas that are your weaknesses, as well as support and solidify your value as an analyst with your police managers. This is especially true at the local level of law enforcement; at the federal level, there is more concern for investigative secrecy due to the fact you are trying to build cases to prosecute. Local level analysts can reap the rewards of relationships with academia more effectively than analysts working "higher" up the law enforcement food chain.
Dr. Pamela Beal was my first academic ally - she was working with the University of Buffalo and connected me to GIS interns as well as generalists. I had many interns in my ten years at the Buffalo Police Department, and, in those first few years, they probably taught me more than I taught them. I learned how to map crime, all about Excel and pivot tables (the golden ticket of crime data analysis in my humble opinion), and everything in between - skills that I sorely needed to make up for my technical skill deficits.
Interns can also help as a force multiplier - they can do some time-consuming tasks (such as cleaning and organizing data) that will allow you to focus on meaningful analytical work.
A short time after I started working as a crime analyst, Robert Heibel contacted me from Mercyhurst College's Research and Intelligence Analyst Program, which is now known as Ridge College’s Institute of Intelligence Studies and Applied Sciences. Bob was an early advocate of academic programs to promote at the growth of the analyst in law enforcement as well as in national security. He wanted to place interns at my agency working under me, and did so. We became friends and later on he invited me to colloquiums where I met world leaders in the field. Connecting with him offered me many opportunities for professional growth, as I will discuss in future posts.
Lesson: Find your academic supporters!
To listen to my conversations with my first two academic supporters on Blog Talk Radio, go to:
Pamela Beal on Grafitti
Pam Beal on Reducing Street Prostitution
Robert Heibel: Knowledge Workers in Intelligence
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