California crime analysts

I have been in California for a couple of days, hence the light blogging this week. Two groups asked me to come out and teach seminars, the Bay Area Crime and Intelligence Analyst Association, and the Northern Valley Crime and Intelligence Analysts Association. They were willing to pay my expenses, and I was willing to help out, so we figured a way to do this on two back-to-back days in order to minimize their cost and my out-of-office time. Day one was in Emeryville on San Fransisco bay, and day two was in Sacramento.

It was a nice respite from Nebraska’s January weather, and it felt to me like the attendees all got at least a couple of good ideas to take back to their home departments. I got a few good ideas from the participants, too. In policing, where most officers work their entire career at the same agency, there is a real risk of stagnation. We often lack the infusion of new ideas that occurs naturally in other occupations with the coming and going of staff. Rubbing shoulders with colleagues from other agencies is particularly valuable for police personnel, and I am grateful for the occasional opportunity. It has certainly helped me be a more effective chief.

The first session was hosted at the Emeryville Police Department, right on the bay and with a splendid view. I encountered a crime analyst in the audience with a strong Lincoln connection. Andrea, a bay area native, introduced herself and told me that she was a 2003 University of Nebraska graduate—in the same program from which I took my degree 33 years ago. She ended up in Lincoln for college through a family friendship with a Lincoln physician. Andrea had some vivid memories of January on the UNL campus. She returned to California for graduate school, and is now a crime analyst at the Oakland Police Department

Andrea is part of a new cohort of crime analysts that are entering the field: women and men who have professionally prepared for analytical work. The vast majority of working crime analysts today learned on the job by doing. They are often converted from records technicians, dispatchers, administrative staffers, and police officers. This isn’t to diminish their skills in any way: their job experiences have often enriched their understanding of the context immensely. We are beginning, though, to see more analysts who have prepared through their formal education for the work at hand. I think as they join the field and are mentored by the seasoned analysts who have learned the ropes, they will be well-positioned to advance the boundaries of crime analysis.

Ex-husbands look alike

When you've been a cop for a few decades, you've come to expect the surveillance photos from a robbery to be fairly worthless--grainy, out of focus, dark, poor resolution. These days, though, things are changing. We are now getting much better photos and video.

It seems that convenience stores always have to best stuff first. Maybe it's because they are smaller and more agile than the big boys. A few years ago, one of our local banks had experienced four robberies at branches over a span of a few months. The COO, a friend of mine, called me up and asked me if there is anything I could think of that the bank could do. "Yeah," I said, "walk next door to the Kwik Shop, buy a big gulp, see what they have for cameras, and then buy the same thing for all your branch banks!"

Last week's bank robbery (the first since October 6, 2008) provides evidence that banks have caught up to 7-Elevens. This was a pretty good beauty shot of the robber--even better at full resolution. You can see his goatee, read the "B" on his cap, and notice the wedding band. Not bad at all. We got this out to the local media pronto, hoping to get some hot leads.

Friday afternoon, I encountered Det. Sgt. Luke Wilke in a workstation examining a screen full of mug shots and drivers license photos. "What's up?" I asked. "I'm chasing leads on the bank robbery," he said, "Everyone is calling to tell us it's their wife's ex-husband, and they all look just like the guy!"

Oh well, better to have plenty of leads than none at all. The photos and video will continue to improve, and we will have plenty of it.

Crime stats 2008

Friday, Mayor Chris Beutler and I released Lincoln's crime statistics for 2008. These are for the FBI Part 1 offenses, the so-called crime index: murder and non-negligent homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft, and larceny-theft. Here are the slides we used at the news conference.




With the exception of robbery (up by 50 offenses), everything else fell, punctuating a long term trend from our peak crime year of 1991. There were fewer actual Part 1 crimes in Lincoln in 2008 than in 1986--when our population was 70,000 less. Careful observers of the Chief's Corner will remember our change in how we handle drive-offs from self-service gas pumps. That look place in late July, 2007, so it impacted the number of reported larcenies for about five months in 2008. This accounts for somewhere between 300 and 400 cases of the 1,682 decline. It's still a very impressive drop.

The elusive "why" is an unanswerable question. That doesn't keep me from trying, though, along with every other criminologist on the face of the earth. I continue to believe that this one is awfully important, along with our problem-solving approach to policing. We've had an exceptionally productive year, and our police officers and support staff should all take a bow.

Loss from crime

Friday, the Mayor will be releasing the 2008 crime statistics for Lincoln. I've been devoting time recently to analysis, some of which has been posted here on the Chief's Corner, with a little more to come in the next few days.

This one is the result of just summing the "loss" field in our Incident Reports. It may be a bit surprising to some people.

Factors in crime, 2008

As I reported near the end of last year, we now collect fields in police incident reports to note whether the case was related to gangs, drugs, or alcohol. Here's the data for 2008:

Since the total number of incident report was down almost 7% in 2008, I think it is fair to conclude that the increase in drug and alcohol related incidents is a reporting phenomenon--we've gotten better about pulling the lever when we think drugs or alcohol played a role in the incident.

These are soft data. It's the officers' best guess as to whether gangs, drugs, or alcohol played any role in the case. Since many cases aren't solved, and many others are solved several hours or days after the offense, there often isn't much of an opportunity to know whether or how these things factored in. Incidents like gang-related graffiti or alcohol-related assaults are fairly straightforward, but you may not know that a burglary (for example) was committed by a someone who was under the influence of alcohol, or that a forgery was committed by a suspect who needed to money to fuel a drug habit.

Bar break crime

It appears that the issue of changing Nebraska's last call hour will be introduced in the legislature again this session. This will be the third time in recent years. I have rendered my views on this previously.

In preparation for the possibility that someone will want to know how that might affect the police, I prepared a little animated graphic on Friday. This was produced from 41,398 violent crimes occurring in Lincoln during the nine year period from 2000 through 2008. Most of those were misdemeanor assaults, but it also includes 8,853 aggravated assaults, 49 murders, 1642 robberies, and 945 rapes. Since you can't display more than about 100 crimes on a map of Lincoln effectively, I've chosen to use a density map that works sort of like a weather map.

If you click on the map below, you'll see the thunderstorm build (it continues to loop, so use the back button on your browser to return to the Chief's Corner):

Effective intervention

Over the past couple of years I have occasionally blogged about the theft of high-value scrap metals, such as aluminum, copper and brass: an international crime problem. There have been two major efforts to interrupt this pattern in Lincoln. The first was the passage by the Lincoln City Council of a package of changes to Lincoln Municipal Ordinances, Chapter 5.41, which went into effect at the end of 2006. The second was the enactment of Legislative Bill 766 by the Nebraska Legislature, which became effective on September 1, 2008.

Click graph for a larger view.

These data demonstrate a dramatic drop off in this crime over the course of the three year period. It appears that the legislative changes were a particularly effective intervention.

Shots fired

I am engaged in my annual process of reviewing the past year, and will be looking at some of the trends and patterns that emerge.

Last year, in this city of a quarter million, eight people were shot in the course of crimes. Two of these were fatal: a police officer shot an assailant armed with a knife, and a women was shot by her boyfriend in a murder/suicide. One person was shot in a robbery; five were shot in assaults.

I have no source for comparison data from other cities, but I have the feeling that this number of persons shot during the course of a year is incredibly low. I do know that both our homicide rate and our robbery rate are very low in comparison to other cities.

Of these eight shootings, only one has not been solved. That case involves a rather suspicious story from an uncooperative victim, and will probably remain uncleared. In two of the cases, the suspects are currently fugitives, and those will both be cleared eventually when they inevitably surface.

Overall there were 224 crimes committed with guns in Lincoln during 2008. The largest single category was weapons offenses; such as discharging a firearm within the City limits, possession of an illegal firearm, carrying a concealed firearm, and felon in possession of a firearm. Here's the breakdown:


It is quite possible (actually, likely) that a good number of the assaults and robberies were not genuine firearms, but rather fakes such as bb guns or Airsoft pistols, but there's no way to know that except in the cases that are cleared and the weapon recovered.