Functions
Crime analysis can occur at various levels, including tactical, operational, and strategic. Crime analysts study crime reports, arrests reports, and police calls for service to identify emerging patterns, series, and trends as quickly as possible. They analyze these phenomena for all relevant factors, sometimes predict or forecast future occurrences, and issue bulletins, reports, and alerts to their agencies. They then work with their police agencies to develop effective strategies and tactics to address crime and disorder. Other duties of crime analysts may include preparing statistics, data queries, or maps on demand; analyzing beat and shift configurations; preparing information for community or court presentations; answering questions from the public and the press; and providing data and information support for a police department's CompStat process.
Sociodemographics, along with spatial and temporal information, are all aspects that crime analysts look at to understand what's going on in their jurisdiction. Crime analysis employs data mining, crime mapping, statistics, research methods, desktop publishing, charting, presentation skills, critical thinking, and a solid understanding of criminal behavior. In this sense, a crime analyst serves as a combination of an information systems specialist, a statistician, a researcher, a criminologist, a journalist, and a planner for a local police department.
Read more about this topic: Crime Analysis
Famous quotes containing the word functions:
“The English masses are lovable: they are kind, decent, tolerant, practical and not stupid. The tragedy is that there are too many of them, and that they are aimless, having outgrown the servile functions for which they were encouraged to multiply. One day these huge crowds will have to seize power because there will be nothing else for them to do, and yet they neither demand power nor are ready to make use of it; they will learn only to be bored in a new way.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“Mark the babe
Not long accustomed to this breathing world;
One that hath barely learned to shape a smile,
Though yet irrational of soul, to grasp
With tiny finger—to let fall a tear;
And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves,
To stretch his limbs, bemocking, as might seem,
The outward functions of intelligent man.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)