Crime analysis
Crime analysis is a specialized area within criminal justice focused on systematically studying crime to assist law enforcement in apprehending offenders and preventing future incidents. Emerging in the 1970s in the United States, it has evolved significantly with advancements in computing and data management. Crime analysts employ a variety of methods, including crime mapping and statistical analysis, to identify patterns, trends, and geographic hot spots of criminal activity. Their work considers various demographic factors such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status, which can provide insights into the characteristics of victims and suspects.
The field encompasses various types of analysis, including criminal investigative analysis, intelligence analysis, tactical analysis, strategic analysis, and administrative analysis. Criminal investigative analysis, often referred to as profiling, focuses on understanding patterns in serial crimes, while intelligence analysis is geared towards detecting organized crime and terrorist activities. Tactical analysis is used for immediate crime response, while strategic analysis looks at broader trends over time to assess law enforcement effectiveness. Administrative analysis serves to communicate key findings to external stakeholders, including government and community groups. Overall, crime analysis plays a critical role in shaping public safety strategies and enhancing law enforcement operations.
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Subject Terms
Crime analysis
Crime analysis is a subfield of criminal justice that systematically studies crimes in order to aid law enforcement in capturing criminals and reducing and preventing further incidents. Crime analysts may assess widespread criminal events, especially serial crimes, and use crime-mapping technology to identify areas of recurrent crime. Related to crime analysis is public safety analysis, or police information analysis, which examines noncriminal disorder incidents. Police departments and policymakers use findings from crime analysis and public safety analysis to address short- and long-term problems.
Overview
Although the sociological and criminological analysis of crime was born in the 1830s in France, modern police crime analysis did not exist until the 1970s in the United States. Subsequent advancements in computing technology and the growth of databases enabled the field of crime analysis to grow and become highly sophisticated. In the early twenty-first century, crime analysis encompasses criminal investigative analysis, intelligence analysis, and tactical, strategic, and administrative analyses.
Crime analysts rely on police report data, field research, and statistical data and methods to identify patterns, trends, and hot spots of criminal activity. They consider crime in terms of individual and group demographics, such as gender, race, and socioeconomic class, as well as in spatial and temporal terms. Individual demographics help identify suspects and victims, while group demographics might uncover potential victims.
Crime mapping geographically plots spatial data about demographics and about where crime happens, and can reveal hot spots of recurrent criminal activity. Temporal analysis examines when crime occurs, down to the time of day and day of the week, and can highlight long-term trends. Spatial and temporal crime data and statistical analyses are often used to produce tables, charts, time lines, and other graphical representations of crime patterns and trends.
The main types of crime analysis are criminal investigative, intelligence, tactical, strategic, and administrative. In criminal investigative analysis, or “profiling,” analysts probe data for patterns that relate to serial crimes on a large geographical scale. Because criminal activity can cut across jurisdictional borders, law enforcement agencies are increasingly seeking to implement regional crime analysis and mapping programs or to coordinate information sharing between local, state, and national agencies.
Intelligence analysis is most often used to detect organized crime rings and terrorist groups and uncover their organizational structures, their locations, and their actions, both past and anticipated. This type of crime analysis relies on both law enforcement reports and noncriminal information such as individuals’ communications and finance data, which may be obtained through surveillance, observation, or informants. Profiling and intelligence analysis are mostly performed at the national level.
Tactical, strategic, and administrative analysis are the types most common to local and state policy operations, and are often assisted in some respects by police management systems like CompStat. Tactical analysis examines and compares recent, reported crimes on a daily basis to identify patterns and leads and to help apprehend suspects. Conducted at periodic intervals, strategic analysis considers crime and disorder in broad categories in order to see and deconstruct longer-term trends and to evaluate the effectiveness of law enforcement response, crime prevention efforts, and public perception. In administrative analysis, analysts determine which high-level analytical findings from the other kinds of crime analysis are presented to different outside audiences, from governmental bodies to the press to citizen groups.
Bibliography
Boba, Rachel. Introductory Guide to Crime Analysis and Mapping. Community Oriented Policing Services, US Dept. of Justice, Nov. 2001. PDF file.
Boba Santos, Rachel. Crime Analysis with Crime Mapping. 3rd ed. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2013. Print.
Burrell, Amy, and Ray Bull. “A Preliminary Examination of Crime Analysts’ Views and Experiences of Comparative Case Analysis.” International Journal of Police Science and Management 13.1 (2011): 2–15. Print.
Iqbal, Rizwan, Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad, and Nurfadhlina Binti Mohd Sharef. “Emerging and Prospering Trends in Crime Analysis and Investigating Systems: A Literature Review.” Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology 47.1 (2013): 53–59. Print.
Osbourne, Deborah, and Susan Wernicke. Introduction to Crime Analysis: Basic Resources for Criminal Justice Practice. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Parshall McDonald, Phyllis. “Information Technology and Crime Analysis.” Information Technology and the Criminal Justice System. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2005. 125–46. Print.
“What Crime Analysts Do.” IACA. Intl. Assoc. of Crime Analysts, 2011. Web. 15 Oct. 2013.