The IACA is proud to announce Dr. Rachel Boba Santos has agreed to present at the 2012 IACA Training Conference to be held September 10-14, 2012 at The Ravella at Lake Las Vegas!
Dr. Boba Santos will present twice at the conference. First, by request, her immensely popular presentation, "A Structure for Crime Analysis Results: Product Examples by Purpose, Scope, and Audience" which was presented to a packed room at the 2011 MAPS Conference in Miami. Second, Dr. Boba Santos will present "Fusion Center Analysis: A Model for Structure and Sample Products" to highlight work being conducted by fusion center analysts. Dr. Boba Santos has also agreed to participate in our open-forum "Ask The Expert" sessions. And, at our request, she will hold a book signing for her book, "Crime Analysis with Crime Mapping, 3rd Edition" released this month from Sage Publications.
Joining already announced keynotes Dr. John Eck and Dr. Cynthia Lum, along with a plenary session featuring The Innocence Project, the IACA continues to build an agenda for a conference you are not going to want to miss!
2012 IACA Training Conference
Dates: September 10-14, 2012
Location: The Ravella at Lake Las Vegas
Early Registration Fees: $400/$450 (member/non)
Hotel: $119 plus tax (IACA block only)
Hotel Shuttle to/from Airport: $30 each way
Registration Opens Soon! Watch the IACA website for details!
Friday, March 30, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Crime Analysts Don't Come in a Box
When I was a young crime analysis intern in the early 1990s, my first assignment was to analyze two years’ of bicycle theft data in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I printed off a list of more than 500 from the old Wang mainframe and started the long process of reading each address, determining its location on the large paper map that took up one wall, and dotting it up with a magic maker. More than two weeks later, I finally had the full map. I then set about creating charts of the top times of day and days of week—which, of course, I drew by hand on graph paper. The whole analysis took about three weeks and resulted in a two-page report.
 |
| Part of me will always miss these days. |
Today, I or any one of you could do the same analysis in about 5 minutes, and most of that would be spent waiting for the GIS application to launch. A few technologies—data querying, spreadsheets, and mapping—have resulted in a net savings to police departments of 2 weeks, 4 days, 7 hours, and 55 minutes.
The Cambridge Police Department did not, with this extra time, conclude that they could do with only 0.2% of their analytical staffing. Nor did many crime analysts, in the post-desktop-computing revolution, do all their work before morning coffee and spend the rest of the week playing video games. Instead, we adapted to this time savings by doing more. Analysis is fundamentally a process of asking the right questions, finding answers, and using those answers to ask more questions. In 1994, I could only ask three questions:
- Where are the bicycle thefts occurring?
- What hours of the day are they occurring?
- What days of the week are they occurring?
In 2011, given the same overall task, I could ask dozens more questions. I could analyze all potential factors, including type of location, victim and offender characteristics, bicycle makes and models, lock type and status, and recovery data. I could cross-tabulate these various characteristics and look for correlations between, say, location and time, or time and day. I could use known offender information to construct a crime travel demand model. I could collect data on bicycle sales from second-hand shops and search for known offenders.
More important, I could get myself out of the damned office and engage in some true problem analysis on bicycle theft. I could speak to victims and ask about their locking habits. I could study environmental variables in the theft hot spots. I could interview known bicycle thieves about their modus operandi. And I could search the literature to figure out what other agencies had successfully done to prevent bicycle theft. I could use this additional information to make explicit recommendations for enforcement and prevention.
There are, in short, plenty of ways to fill the “saved” 2.98 weeks, even if I did nothing but continue to analyze bicycle theft with it. In reality, of course, we’ve used this saved time to analyze things we never had a chance to analyze before. When I started as a crime analyst, almost all analysts kept lists of five or six “target crimes” on which they spent most of their time. Now, thanks to technology, I find analysts analyzing all sorts of things that we would have laughed about in the 1980s and early 1990s: noise complaints, domestic disputes, traffic collisions, parking complaints, and so on. The entire discipline of problem analysis was virtually impossible in the per-technology era because we were spending too much time putting pins in maps and logging crimes in paper matrices to do anything qualitative.
Never once, in that era of transition to desktop computing, did I hear any analyst, officer, or chief suggest that ArcView or Microsoft Excel was going to render analysts obsolete. It would have been absurd. Technology does not decrease the need for analysis; rather, by saving time and effort, it empowers analysts to a greater degree of breadth and depth. By making certain tasks of analysis unnecessary, technology does not make analysis itself unnecessary.
Analogues abound in other areas of policing and society. No one hawks telephone reporting or online reporting as replacements for police officers; instead, they allow police officers to focus on things that make better use of their skill sets. Computers in cars have not eliminated the need for mechanics. The existence of thousands of web sites devoted to home improvement did not make it any less advisable to call a professional contractor when I had to re-do my kitchen. All of these individuals, like crime analysts, offer a service that cannot be shifted to any technological solution.
Of course, most of you are nodding along—after all, you’re analysts. “Christopher,” you’re saying patiently, “You’re preaching to the choir.”
But actually, if you’re an analyst, I’m not really talking to you. I’m writing this message, instead, for a handful of companies who, in the last few years, have been increasingly selling their products as “replacements” for actual crime analysts—who think that by making mapping, charting, and statistics easier for the analyst—or other members of the agency—they are obviating the analyst.
I am writing to companies who have used phrases like “crime analyst in a box” to describe their software, or who say that it “allows any member of the police department to be a crime analyst,” or who tout to the media that a crime analyst costs $70,000 per year but the software can be had for only $30,000.
Listen up.
I used to spend a lot of time pushing pins into paper. When GIS systems came along, I didn’t have to do that anymore, so I was able to spend my time making more advanced thematic maps for my executives and officers. Then you came along with special crime mapping packages that allowed them to make some of those maps themselves, so I was able to research and learn about spatial statistics and apply the right hot spot technique to the right map. You’re doing some of that, too, now, so I’m spending time learning Crime Travel Demand and Risk Terrain Modeling.
I used to spend a lot of time keeping logs of crime series on paper matrices. Then you gave me data querying technologies that allowed me to generate dynamic matrices from my RMS. That was great—I could spend more time chasing leads on potential suspects and developing known offender files. You came along with software that linked intelligence from multiple sources, so I re-directed my time to advanced temporal and spatial forecasting models.
Throughout this evolution, my professional association has made this development possible with literature, training, peer networking, and the sharing of ideas over our discussion list. It’s kept up with your technology—while still providing basic training to analysts who don’t have it yet. And the more you provide, the more we will to continue to advance. We will never be obsolete.
I would encourage you to take a lesson from the web site WebMD, which, while providing a host of diagnostic tools, says:
More important, I could get myself out of the damned office and engage in some true problem analysis on bicycle theft. I could speak to victims and ask about their locking habits. I could study environmental variables in the theft hot spots. I could interview known bicycle thieves about their modus operandi. And I could search the literature to figure out what other agencies had successfully done to prevent bicycle theft. I could use this additional information to make explicit recommendations for enforcement and prevention.
There are, in short, plenty of ways to fill the “saved” 2.98 weeks, even if I did nothing but continue to analyze bicycle theft with it. In reality, of course, we’ve used this saved time to analyze things we never had a chance to analyze before. When I started as a crime analyst, almost all analysts kept lists of five or six “target crimes” on which they spent most of their time. Now, thanks to technology, I find analysts analyzing all sorts of things that we would have laughed about in the 1980s and early 1990s: noise complaints, domestic disputes, traffic collisions, parking complaints, and so on. The entire discipline of problem analysis was virtually impossible in the per-technology era because we were spending too much time putting pins in maps and logging crimes in paper matrices to do anything qualitative.
Never once, in that era of transition to desktop computing, did I hear any analyst, officer, or chief suggest that ArcView or Microsoft Excel was going to render analysts obsolete. It would have been absurd. Technology does not decrease the need for analysis; rather, by saving time and effort, it empowers analysts to a greater degree of breadth and depth. By making certain tasks of analysis unnecessary, technology does not make analysis itself unnecessary.
Analogues abound in other areas of policing and society. No one hawks telephone reporting or online reporting as replacements for police officers; instead, they allow police officers to focus on things that make better use of their skill sets. Computers in cars have not eliminated the need for mechanics. The existence of thousands of web sites devoted to home improvement did not make it any less advisable to call a professional contractor when I had to re-do my kitchen. All of these individuals, like crime analysts, offer a service that cannot be shifted to any technological solution.
Of course, most of you are nodding along—after all, you’re analysts. “Christopher,” you’re saying patiently, “You’re preaching to the choir.”
But actually, if you’re an analyst, I’m not really talking to you. I’m writing this message, instead, for a handful of companies who, in the last few years, have been increasingly selling their products as “replacements” for actual crime analysts—who think that by making mapping, charting, and statistics easier for the analyst—or other members of the agency—they are obviating the analyst.
I am writing to companies who have used phrases like “crime analyst in a box” to describe their software, or who say that it “allows any member of the police department to be a crime analyst,” or who tout to the media that a crime analyst costs $70,000 per year but the software can be had for only $30,000.
Listen up.
I used to spend a lot of time pushing pins into paper. When GIS systems came along, I didn’t have to do that anymore, so I was able to spend my time making more advanced thematic maps for my executives and officers. Then you came along with special crime mapping packages that allowed them to make some of those maps themselves, so I was able to research and learn about spatial statistics and apply the right hot spot technique to the right map. You’re doing some of that, too, now, so I’m spending time learning Crime Travel Demand and Risk Terrain Modeling.
I used to spend a lot of time keeping logs of crime series on paper matrices. Then you gave me data querying technologies that allowed me to generate dynamic matrices from my RMS. That was great—I could spend more time chasing leads on potential suspects and developing known offender files. You came along with software that linked intelligence from multiple sources, so I re-directed my time to advanced temporal and spatial forecasting models.
Throughout this evolution, my professional association has made this development possible with literature, training, peer networking, and the sharing of ideas over our discussion list. It’s kept up with your technology—while still providing basic training to analysts who don’t have it yet. And the more you provide, the more we will to continue to advance. We will never be obsolete.
I would encourage you to take a lesson from the web site WebMD, which, while providing a host of diagnostic tools, says:
This content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.
Or, perhaps, look to the web site FindLaw:
We try to provide quality information, but we make no claims, promises or guarantees about the accuracy, completeness, or adequacy of the information contained in or linked to this web site and its associated sites. As legal advice must be tailored to the specific circumstances of each case, and laws are constantly changing, nothing provided herein should be used as a substitute for the advice of competent counsel.
I know you have to look out for your bottom line. I don’t expect you to convince chiefs that they need analysts more than they need your software—that’s our job. I don’t expect you to refuse to sell your analysis tools to agencies that don’t have a full time analyst. But I do expect you to stop suggesting that your product takes the place of an analyst. Analysts do not simply generate numbers and maps; they provide context and interpretation. They fuse quantitative and qualitative data, and they serve as expert consultants to their agencies on what does and doesn’t work for various problems. Many of them are pioneering models that predict future crime, triage the use of resources, and identify high-volume offenders. But they only learned how to do these things by first getting their hands dirty doing the things that you’re telling agencies they don’t need an analyst to do. Our jobs are to take the data that your software provides and to dig deeper. If you provide software that does some of that deeper digging for us, then we’ll dig deeper still.
Crime analysis will always have a love-hate relationship with emerging technologies, but it’s more love than hate. Your technologies allow us to have a much greater effect on crime and disorder in our communities than we were able to have when this profession started. Most of the discussion at crime analysis conferences these days centers on how to best employ technologies. We respect what you’ve done for us. Respect us in turn. Crime analysis does not, and never will, come in a box.
Christopher W. Bruce
President
International Association of Crime Analysts
Crime analysis will always have a love-hate relationship with emerging technologies, but it’s more love than hate. Your technologies allow us to have a much greater effect on crime and disorder in our communities than we were able to have when this profession started. Most of the discussion at crime analysis conferences these days centers on how to best employ technologies. We respect what you’ve done for us. Respect us in turn. Crime analysis does not, and never will, come in a box.
Christopher W. Bruce
President
International Association of Crime Analysts
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