Strategic Crime Analysis
The police use a process and statistics in order to determine where crimes happen, why and how to put in place strategies and frameworks to combat various problems. One methodology is the SARA process. This process is comprised of Scanning, Analyzing, Responding, and Assessing (Santos, 2017). This process is used to solve short, long and immediate problems. In the case of commercial robberies, a long term approach to the analysis of the crimes and the response associated with these crimes is necessary. This begins with the scanning step.
Scanning- In this step, the analysts look to see if a problem exists, how long it has been going on and how frequently the occurrence happens and the environment or where it occurs is important. Specifying an environment allows comparisons of environments with and without the problem (Santos, 2017). The analysts also look into the issues created from the problem. In this case, when talking about commercial burglaries, where they would look into where, when, quantity and what was taken or damage caused to the commercial building. These are different than residential burglaries in that they take place during the day and commercial usually take place at night, the times when no one is usually at the establishment. The analysts use crime reports, calls into the police for service and arrests if any. This step is to find out the “why”. As in the environment and the behavior associated with the problem (Santos, 2017).
Hot spots would be developed, maybe it was a certain commodity that they were looking for and they could look at hot products, and even on a larger scale into a hot area in the city. They could use a spot map in this case and look for patterns. This is where the statistics would come in. They would find the rate, what the variable was and the frequency within that variable compared to another variable. Say commercial in one part of the city compared to another. This can be done on a small scale using a spot map or on a larger scale using geospatial crime mapping. The analyst would overlay? the commercial robberies over the map, locations of commercial buildings and be able to see where the highest concentrations were. This is all a part of the CompStat policing strategy. This geographic distribution analysis or spatial analysis would tell you where the highest concentrations are, usually described as the rate per X number of people, or in this case rate per number of commercial buildings in specified commercial areas.
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