Crime Analysts, Roles of

Traditional Roles

The three types of crime analysis that predominate in policing are administrative, tactical, and strategic. Within these categories, crime analysts perform many varied roles. An analyst in a smaller agency often has to fill all of these roles, perhaps even within the same day at the office. While most analysts are cross-trained to perform all of these roles, in large departments they may specialize and spend most of their time on only one of them. This may be determined by where they are located within the agency’s organizational structure (e.g., chief’s office versus patrol or investigative division), the most frequent consumers of crime analysis products in their agency (i.e., management, community policing officers, or detectives), their skills, or any combination of the above.

When crime analysts are in the role of administrative analyst, they are generally conducting tallies of crime and arrest reports, calls for service, workload analysis, or other administrative statistics. Because every law enforcement agency is obligated to provide Uniform Crime Reports data to the FBI, oftentimes this responsibility falls on the crime analyst who is most familiar with the data and may be already doing similar monthly or quarterly reports for the police chief or sheriff.

The role of tactical analyst has become common in the past two decades, as analysts play a larger role in identifying crime patterns, trends, and series to support both patrol officers as well as investigators. The role of the crime analyst in the performance of strategic analysis varies widely. This may include working on long-term problems, assisting with research projects, technology acquisition, or organizational change issues. Strategic analyst is the role that is most closely related to the role of analyst as a problem solver.

Another role that may arise for crime analysts is that of intelligence analyst. Intelligence analysts were predominantly in federal and state agencies and task forces until September 11, 2001. With the substantial increase in funding and focus on homeland security, many local police agencies created and hired “intel” analysts to work at fusion centers (entities located in states and major urban areas throughout the country, and deal with the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information across all levels of government) as well as within city and county agencies. Crime analysts may serve an intelligence-gathering role in some agencies, focusing on organized crime, terrorism, or homeland security; however, to date they have not been involved with community policing and problem solving.

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