U.S. Department of Justice: Crime analysis for problem solvers in 60 small steps.
The Center for Problem-Oriented Policing (POP Center)
(www.popcenter.org) now serves as a locus for the
collection of the growing body of knowledge regarding
problems commonly encountered by the police. It
disseminates this material in various ways, but primarily
through the publication of its problem-oriented guides.
Each guide synthesizes existing knowledge and evaluated
practices regarding a specific problem, and stimulates
police to advance their own thinking about how best to
handle the problem in its local context.
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:
1. You use modern computing and know how to access
and manipulate comprehensive databases.
2. You know how to use software to map crime, to
identify hot spots, and to relate these to demographic
and other data.
3. You routinely produce charts showing weekly or
monthly changes in crime at departmental and beat
level, perhaps to support CompStat-style operations.
4. 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.
5. You may have carried out some before-and-after
evaluations of crackdowns, such as on residential
burglaries or car thefts.
6. You have some basic knowledge of statistics and
research methodology such as is provided by an
undergraduate social science degree.
Link: http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/CrimeAnalysis60Steps.pdf