Getting police to think more about using data in decision-making has become extremely important today, perhaps more than ever.
As a visiting fellow at the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), police innovation is an area I am focusing on, particularly predictive policing and smart policing, both of which involve analytics.
The era of proactive, problem-solving policing is here. Technology-based tools are in use in more and more communities across our nation to “pre-empt” crime by helping law enforcement predict, prevent, and reduce cross-jurisdictional violence. Modern crime fighting also helped police go from reacting to crimes to calculating where it is likely to happen and deploying personnel and resources there accordingly.
Don’t get me wrong: predictive policing does not replace traditional police work. Rather, it advances conventional law enforcement approaches, such as community policing and hot spot policing.
To keep up with what the future holds, more police agencies need to start developing and implement new policing strategies that emphasize the use of predictive analytics, new technologies, and criminological theory to identify crime locations and potential victims of crime.
A good place to start is to establish data and analytic standards to allow partner agencies to share data easily among each other as well as internally. This includes the ability to share information about gangs, chronic offenders, basic crime data, and many other areas.
At the same time, smart policing tactics aimed at reducing gang and gun violence can surgically extract chronic violent offenders from specific locations and then restore neighborhoods to peaceful settings. These operations are done following thorough computer mapping and spatial analysis, social network analysis, and definitions of hotspots. As a result, these extractions are “non-invasive,” offering a faster recuperation period and return to a state of normalcy in communities.
I learned a lot of this years ago when I was at the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), where we stressed the interaction of research and crime analysis. One of the backbones of community policing is problem solving, and that whole arena stresses the need to analyze and have data, and to have people who can do that kind of work. Even back then, we looked at how to redeploy police officers and hire civilians to do crime analysis. We pressed forward on the notion of using geographic information systems (GIS) and different software packages to analyze data. COPS funded about $300 million of computer technologies for law enforcement agencies.
Today, that’s the direction police work continues to head: using data and using analytics to drive decision-making. So as police departments evaluate their responses to crime, they have to look at innovation to tackle their biggest challenges.
About a year ago, my team at Justice & Security Strategies started getting questions from police departments.
Administrators at smaller departments were asking: “What is the value of crime analysis and how do we defend the requests we want to make for these civilian positions?”
Before long, administrators from medium and large departments, facing budget cuts, were inquiring about similar dilemmas: “How do we keep crime analysts, justify them, make sure people understand what they do—and how do we work with the city budget people who don’t understand crime analysis and its value?”
And many chiefs and other senior administrators had questions of their own: “Why don’t we have something on cost-benefit analysis (CBA)? We know what the costs and the benefits are. Will that help us justify the positions and ask for more analysts?”
These are all great questions. In the budget scenarios that many cities are now facing, they’re trying to justify people and technology. Law enforcement is concerned about having the right type of analysts on the job, as well as keeping civilians, and not having these positions cut.
All of this coincides with a national effort by Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) to enhance the whole field of crime analysis.
Right now, the director of BJA, Denise O’Donnell, and the deputy director, Kristen Mahoney, are pursuing this idea of having analytics and analysis more and more within policing. And they’re pushing programs for training and technical assistance, improving curricula for crime analysts.
I’ve assisted with a new paper, Putting a Value on Crime Analysts, that explores these timely matters. This document is useful to members of Law Enforcement Forecasting Group (LEFG) and the BJA staff and grantees working on crime analysis-related issues.
The paper raises three key questions on the value of crime analysis.
First: What is the purpose? Why do we have crime analysts and what do we use them for? In some cases, analysts aren’t used for analytic purposes, and that doesn’t make any sense.
Second: What are the costs associated with crime analysis? We don’t think about the costs. It’s important for police to hone in on that and on the added value that crime analysts provide for them.
And third: Are there feasible alternatives to having a crime analyst on staff? That raises other questions: Do we use contractors; do we use researchers—and still get what we need but not necessarily have a staffer?
If people focus on those three areas, it will get them thinking about what crime analysts do, what their costs are, and what other ways there are to do this kind of work. And ultimately, that kind of thinking will buttress the arguments for crime analysts.
