Happy to report the monthly information sharing meeting between LE and our Retail partners is kicking back up Friday April 18th at 11:00am at the Northborough PD. Ample parking in the back 2 lots. Please come with hand outs to pass out (20-30 copies) or a thumb drive to show on the screen. Any questions, please contact Kevin Daly or Carol Fitzgerald and hope to see you there!
The IACA is seeking speakers for the conference - held sept 8th -12th at the Omni Orlando Resort at Championsgate, 1500 Masters Blvd, Championsgate, FL 33896
Link for more info is below
https://www.iaca.net/call-for-presentations
Good morning - I am touch with a current Leominster PD Dispatcher and student at Umass Lowell. She is required to do an internship and is interested in finding a crime/intelligence analysis position. We are guessing it would be about 12 hours per week. She currently lives in Leominster and will to travel. Looking to see if any PD, DOC or other agency is interested. She has been a dispatcher at Leominster for a number of years and is fluent with the ongoings of policing.
Does anyone have a point of contact for Telegram? Either briefings/presentations or preservation letters?
Treasurer Sharon Phelan and Secretary Keri Lebeau discussed the website changes to add notes from each meeting.
The topic of mental illness in day-to-day Police work has been gaining more and more attention. Mental illness can present in a wide variety of ways, many of which often involve disorderly, self-injurious, and sometimes criminal behavior or victimization that results in Police response. According to one estimate (Deane et. al 1999) 7% of police contacts in jurisdictions with 100,000 or more people involve the mentally ill. Worcester’s incident data falls right in line with that estimate with 7% of annual incidents involving someone who has been issued one or more Section 12 restraint prior to the date of the incident. That translates to, on average, about 6 Police interactions in the City each day that involve someone with a known mental health history.
While we know that most mentally ill persons are not violent, there are some mental illnesses which with certain co-occurring conditions are at an elevated risk for potential violent behavior. It is important to understand what those risk factors are, and it’s critical for Officers to be well-trained in best practices on how to de-escalate incidents involving the mentally ill.
As analysts we ought to assist in identifying this high-risk subset of the population and provide Police with the information they need to intercede preventatively. The HUB, an international collaborative model for risk-driven intervention, has outlined the risk factors most commonly observed in the violent mentally ill. Many of the risk factors are details that most analysts can garner and assemble right from the data available in their RMS… things like past violent behavior, homelessness, evidence of self-medicating (section 35 or overdoses), history of running away, past suicide attempts… Analysts who are savvy in query writing can become instrumental in quickly identifying high-risk individuals who might qualify for and benefit from intervention. Having this information can also be helpful in harnessing available funding for initiatives such as the development of Crisis Intervention Teams, a model which brings together “law enforcement, mental health providers, hospital emergency departments and individuals with mental illness and their families to improve responses to people in crisis” (NAMI 2018).
Originally posted by Tiana Antul:
Most of the time you'll know which type of chart best suits your data and what it is that you're trying to convey. For those times when you're not so sure, here's a quick reference guide from the book "Good Charts" by Scott Berinato.
For when you're making comparisons in data: Bars, Bumps, Lines, Slopes, and Small multiples
For when you're illustrating distributions: Alluvials, Bubbles, Histograms, Sankeys, Scatter Plots
For when you're showing data composition: Pie charts, Stacked areas, Stacked bars, Treemaps, and Units
And for when you want to diagram relationships, illustrate space and networks etc.: Flow charts, Maps, Hierarchies, 2X2s, and Network diagrams.
Whether you’ve been doing crime analysis for one year or fifteen years, chances are that at some point in your career you’ve seen the intentional skewing of crime statistics, or perhaps more commonly, the flawed and incorrect interpretation of crime statistics by well-meaning people who simply don’t understand them.
Well one Police Chief in Texarkana, Texas is firing back. Watch this video of Police Chief Shiner responding intelligently to some misrepresented data about his City at a City Council meeting this past Monday. He makes some great points including:
While he doesn’t mention the use of crime analysis specifically, the Department seems to be doing some great work in the areas of problem-oriented policing, community policing, and involving the public in its police work. Chief Shiner also seems to understand a thing or two about crime statistics and the responsible interpretation and representation of those statistics.
When I first started working at my Department our Crime Analysis Unit ran a regular report called Unit Measures, which was intended to measure the performance of each Operations shift. It had been a report staple for some time before I began working there, but as years passed it eventually faded away into the black hole of report oblivion.
Looking back, it’s easy to see why. It provided basic stats on how many incidents took place on each shift, how many arrests were made on each shift, etc. Like many other reports it was probably really well-received when it was new, and then Crime Analysis dutifully continued to run it on some agreed upon schedule for years, not realizing until long after the fact that interest in it had faded if not disappeared entirely, and people had long stopped looking at it. It had become nothing more than a time-wasting perfunctory task.
The report, despite good intentions, had problems from the start. Its content had a very narrow focus. Aggregate incident and arrest numbers do very little to measure performance or showcase the actual work and successes of a police organization. Moreover, normal human activity patterns (work, play, sleep, repeat) caused natural fluctuations in incident and arrest volumes across the three shifts which had the effect of pitting each Operations shift against one another. The busiest shift would boast that they handled the lion’s share of the work, tacitly implying that the other shifts had it easy and didn’t work as hard.
Years later I now find myself asking the important question of how performance should be measured. Shortly after the New Year our Operations Captains were asked to develop a report on what they had done in the 2015 calendar year. There was no real discussion or consensus about what the report should include so each shift Captain began forging their own path based on what they thought was important. Some of them came to me asking for specific information. Namely they wanted to know the number of incidents and the number of arrests made by each shift. Then during a conversation with one official, the old Unit Measures report came up, and he asked me a question that got me thinking critically about how we measure things. Regarding the old Unit Measures report, he simply asked, “Yeah, but what did that actually tell us?”. The answer was even simpler. Nothing. That old report told us absolutely nothing.
I’d like to use this as an opportunity to re-invent the Unit Measures report from the ground up. To create a new report which serves as a canvas or platform from which to truly showcase our Agency’s achievements and accomplishments and reflect the wide-ranging activities that our Officers engage in. I started doing research and quickly realized that the rich data I need for such a report is not the type of data that I’m personally in a position to provide. What I found and learned is that all of the usual indicators used by Police Departments to measure performance (reductions in crime, number of cases investigated/cleared, response times, arrests made, etc.) reveal absolutely nothing about whether or not an agency is policing intelligently, using proper methods, or having a positive impact.
So if traditional indicators are wholly insufficient at measuring performance, then which indicators would tell the story and do it justice? An NIJ paper on the topic cites a work by Herman Goldstein in which he explores assessing performance in seven dimensions:
Whether these are dimensions you happen to agree on or not, I think most would agree that these serve as far better indicators of performance than aggregate crime statistics. But what metrics can we, and should we, use to measure along these dimensions? This is the question that needs to be answered if we’re to develop a valuable performance-based analysis of police work. I encourage you to think about this and comment below with your thoughts on the topic.
Are you familiar with the Armed Career Criminal Law? Essentially the Armed Career Criminal Law is designed to target offenders who are known for gun-related violent crimes and/or serious drug offenses. The law allows stricter, lengthier sentences to be imposed once these offenders pass a certain threshold for these particular types of convictions. You can read more about the details of the Armed Career Criminal Law here: https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter269/Section10G
Because we know it’s a relatively small “few” who account for the majority of these types of offenses, this is a great tool for Courts to use to keep these types of offenders off of our streets for greater periods of time. If used judiciously (pun intended) it can effectuate real long-term reductions in gun violence and drug related crimes.
But what can the analyst do? Clearly you’re not going to BOP every known offender in your jurisdiction and hand tally their convictions to see who might be on the edge of reaching enough convictions to qualify. And unless you have the capacity to electronically query your Courthouse’s records for case dispositions (you might have better luck finding a magical Unicorn), then you’re probably wondering how you can help your agency when it comes to identifying serious offenders who might be ideal for future prosecution under ACCL.
While we might not be able to query conviction data, we can do the next best thing which is to use Police Data to identify those whose arrest charges point to the possibility of there being enough qualifying convictions to move forward with trying someone under ACCL for future qualifying offenses (you know… assuming they haven’t turned their lives around and are now living a crime-free life). This way we can at least narrow our focus and come up with a list of offenders to have on our radar should they commit another ACCL qualifying crime.
First, you’ll want to create a collection of all the applicable charges which you will use in your query. I’m still in the process of working with my Commanders to finalize the list, but to start I suggest being more inclusive than exclusive. You can always fine-tune your list of charges later once you have the query in working order. So go ahead and gather your gun-related charges as well as your drug offenses, mainly those pertaining to the possession, manufacture, and distribution of controlled substances.
Next create a query that fetches all the people with arrests involving these charges and tally them up. At minimum we’re looking for two qualifying violent crimes, 2 qualifying drug offenses, or any combination thereof that adds up to two but which arise from separate incidences. The list that results will be a good starting point. You can now get input from Officers as to who on that list your Town or City would benefit most from being put away for a longer period of time the next time they commit a similar offense. You can also sort these by each person’s most recent activity date and number of recent incident involvements to flesh out the ones who are most active right now. The more you dive in to your data, the finer you will be able to tune the list to a manageable number of offenders who might be exactly the types of candidates for whom the Armed Career Criminal Law was intended. With the blessing of your superior, start running directed BOPs (or have an Intern do it) and see if these individuals have the number of convictions needed to qualify for prosecution under ACCL. Once you've finalized your list using conviction data, these are people your Officers will want to keep on their radar, particularly your violent crime Detectives and Vice Officers. And as an analyst, you’ll have helped your Department keep its commitment to reducing gun violence and drug crimes by providing a very specific focus that can effectuate real long term reductions.
