When a law enforcement agency is faced with staffing cuts, it might decide that keeping a police officer on the street is preferable to retaining a crime analyst working in headquarters. Your citizens will agree. Who wouldn't want a cop versus an analyst? It makes sense emotionally, but what often appears best on the surface is not as reasonable as it seems.
Quality, efficient crime analysis can save you and your citizens money. And since you are a citizen, this cost-savings hits your pockets, too!
Hypothetical
Here is a fictionalized but realistic story explaining how this concept applies to an average mid-sized police department:
Suppose there is a neighborhood that is chronically plagued by burglaries. The precinct officers know there is a problem, because they respond to the calls. The command staff may know about the problem–maybe they are using pin maps to keep track of the locations. Let us say there is an average of twenty burglaries per month in a specific area of ten blocks. Every time there is a burglary call, a car crew is deployed. Each call averages one hour from dispatch to close.
Assume that that this has been a chronic pattern for two years. That would come out to 480 man-hours spent by car crews on this burglary pattern assuming deployment of officers in two-man cars. If the officers were paid twenty dollars an hour, the cost of their time would be $19,200–and that does not count any other costs involved, such as time taken away from other responsibilities and vehicle-related costs.
In this hypothetical police department, there is no crime analysis, except for that done by individual officers. Individual police officers know of the problem, but there is no formal mechanism in place for them to communicate and understand the extent of the problem. Police managers have a number of problems to address and have not noticed the scope of this problem. The citizens of this neighborhood are affected by this chronic burglary activity with higher home insurance costs and homeowner flight to the suburbs.
We might suppose that, if there had been a crime analysis department in this agency working on tracking burglaries the pattern would be noticed fairly early, within the first weeks at least, within the first months at most. The crime analyst reads every burglary report and notes which ones might be related–maybe 60% of the burglaries in this neighborhood have a similar modus operandi. He or she plots these burglaries on a matrix and significant information comes to light. He or she does a temporal analysis, and discovers that these burglaries occur most often on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings.
A bulletin is sent to the precinct with any relevant information. Seldom are there suspect descriptions on burglary reports, but the analyst may find three cases with descriptions and include the description information in the bulletin. The bulletin will tell officers what time of day the burglars are most likely to strike. There may be a vehicle description: a witness saw a white four-door sedan leaving the driveway of one of the victims. This information is added to the bulletin.
The district captain reads the bulletin and posts it for all patrol to read. He directs patrol officers to cruise around that neighborhood at that time of day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. He deploys an undercover car to do surveillance. Officers attend a community meeting and instruct neighborhood residents in measures to take to make their homes less likely to be targeted for burglars.
In two months, as a result of patrol focus on the target area, they catch a burglar who implicates two other individuals as being part of a burglary ring. Arrests are made and burglaries decrease significantly in this neighborhood.
Cost savings
If, theoretically, with a crime analyst working on burglary analysis, this burglary pattern in this neighborhood ends after four months of activity, we can calculate some cost savings. If we say that 60% of the burglaries were attributable to the arrested burglars, the two-year cost in patrol officer man-hours is $11,520. Four months of this burglary pattern cost the department $1,920 in officer work hours. This early detection of a crime problem represents savings of $9,600. The crime analyst gets paid, of course, but just think of how many patterns of crime can be detected earlier by just one crime analyst, resulting in similar savings. More importantly, the result is reduced crime in a neighborhood, saving the citizens and insurance companies money. The community feels safer, and there can be no price tag on that.
The fact is that law enforcement agencies have limited resources. From the victimized citizens' point of view, it would be wonderful to put equal resources into every investigation, to apprehend every criminal, to prevent all future crime. We know that to be an impossible dream. Our frequent strategy of random patrol is not the most effective way to use our limited policing resources. If crime is analyzed systematically in a local law enforcement agency, judicious deployment of patrol can be implemented and increase our effectiveness. It will save money! It may also save lives.
Police departments must operate like businesses in that they are expected to make the most of limited resources with the objective of pleasing their customers. For police, their "customers" are the citizens and the "product" is public safety. Unlike policing, businesses must make a profit to survive. Police agencies are not as motivated as private industry to maximize use of their resources because of the lack of "profit" motive–our business continues no matter what. However, as citizens become more educated and the demand for improved public safety measures increases, local law enforcement is challenged to find newer and better ways to deliver their services. The role of the crime analyst is a crucial key to that process. Invest in analysis!