Information on patterns can help law enforcement agencies deploy resources in a more effective manner, and assist detectives in identifying and apprehending suspects.
They analyze these phenomena for all relevant factors, sometimes predict or forecast future occurrences, and issue bulletins, reports, and alerts to their agencies.
Other duties of crime analysts may include preparing statistics, data queries, or maps on demand; analyzing beat and shift configurations; preparing information for community or court presentations; answering questions from the public and the press; and providing data and information support for a police department's CompStat process.
Prof. of Statistics at MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-author of Learning to Detect Patterns of Crime Cynthia Rudin have designed a machine learning method called “Series Finder” that can assist police in discovering crime series in a fraction of the time.
The Cambridge Police Department has one of the oldest crime analysis units in the world and their historical data was used to train Series Finder to detect housebreak patterns.
In this sense, a crime analyst serves as a combination of an information systems specialist, a statistician, a researcher, a criminologist, a journalist, and a planner for a local police department.
Many medium and large local law enforcement agencies have dedicated crime analysis units, while many smaller jurisdictions (e.g. townships) may have a police force that consists of just a few police officers who do not specialize in crime analysis or any other specific aspect of law enforcement.
At first only present in very large municipal agencies, the profession got a boost in the 1970s under funding supplied by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA).
This was rolled out in 2000 by the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS, now part of the National Crime Agency (NCA)) and adopted by ACPO, becoming a requirement for UK police forces, with a number of minimum standards assessed during inspection by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC).
The key skills of an analyst within UK law enforcement must to be identify patterns and trends, make inferences in relation to these patterns, provide recommendations to support action and provide products and briefings that deliver this information and interpretation clearly and in an appropriate format for the audience.