Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers In 60 Small Steps

By Ronald V. Clarke and John E. Eck

This 60-step manual assumes that you are an experienced analyst and that you are accustomed to providing the kind of information needed to support police operations. This means that:

You use modern computing and know how to access and manipulate comprehensive databases.

You know how to use software to map crime, to identify hot spots, and to relate these to demographic and other data.

You routinely produce charts showing weekly or monthly changes in crime at departmental and beat level, perhaps to support CompStat-style operations.

You are accustomed to carrying out analyses into such topics as the relationship between the addresses of known offenders and local outbreaks of car theft and burglary.

You may have carried out some before-and-after evaluations of crackdowns, such as on residential burglaries or car thefts.

You have some basic knowledge of statistics and research methodology such as is provided by an undergraduate social science degree.

The manual builds on this experience to prepare you for a different analytic role as a key member of a problem-solving team. Indeed, the latest writings on problem-oriented policing see crime analysts as central to this new way of policing communities. These writers argue that many of the weaknesses of current practice result from the insufficient involvement of well-trained crime analysts at each stage of the problem-solving process.

Washington, DC: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, 2016. 148p.