Posted: February 14th, 2023

Crime Analysis Technologies and their Importance to the Community and Law Enforcement

Crime Analysis Technologies and Their Importance to the Community and Law Enforcement
Crime analysis is an imperative step in the solution of crimes in the criminal justice system. Crime analysis is a tactic used by law enforcement officials to facilitate their analysis of relevant information about crime patterns, trends, apprehension’s as prevention. There are different technologies deployed to help in the accurate analysis of the crime sense and evidence collected. Crime analysis heavily relies on technology to help collect, store, and analyze data (Strom, 2017). These technologies include communication systems, computers, and collection and data storage. They play different roles in data analysis; however, they are equally important in crime analysis. This paper discusses the different technologies used in crime analysis while highlighting the benefits of crime analysis to community and law enforcement.
Herein are some of the technologies used in crime analysis
Computer-aided dispatch system
This is one of the highly specialized systems that use geographical display and telecommunication to help law enforcement officials to facilitate dispatch and response functions. CAD technology is imperative technology in crime analysis as they help record the service class and dispatch officers o the scenes. It provides the unit’s history as it tracks the official’s activities and location and, notably, the officer-initiated activities. In crime analysis, CAD systems help crime analysis collect, store, and retrieve when data when need be (Kim, 2020).
Records management systems
This technology is used for data entry and storage that is specifically designed for law enforcement officials. These officials use the record management system to information directly; therefore, the system will contain all the relevant information needed for crime analysis, such as arrest reports, crime reports, vehicle information, field information, and personal information. The RMS may contain numerous information with varied purposes; the software helps to retrieve incidents and check the quality and accuracy of data with record clerks’ help. They ensure the information in the RMS complies with the laws and policies. The law enforcement officials use these crime reports to locate individual s or even for insurance and court purposes (Dağlar, 2016).
Geographical data system
This technology helps to create, maintain, and store geographical data system. City agencies use it to maintain data regarding parcels, streets, roads, and highways; in most cases, aerial photographs of places to be used in planning utilities. Notably, the system comes in handy in criminal analysis; the officers borrow the data from these systems to conduct their analysis. However, crime analysts o not create or maintain the data in the Geographical data system; the county agencies store it. They only obtain the data when the need is, say when criminal conduction analysis of specific areas, and require the extra information. once this information has been obtained, it is then analyzed in spreadsheet software, statistical software and other cases a geographical information systems software (Dağlar, 2016).
Benefits of crime analysis
Crime analysis plays a critical role for the benefit of both society and law enforcement. For law enforcement, they help analyze crime patterns hence comes in handy for predictive policing. In this aspect, for essence, through crime analysis, law enforcement officials can evaluate the crime statistic and use it to predict future crimes and use it as a tool to decrease future crimes. Secondly, law enforcement officials make apprehensions of crime suspects by obtaining adequate information relating to the crime (Hardyns, 2018). The community improves community relations as crime analysis allows the criminal justice system to go public with crime information, thus fostering transparency between the system and the community. Additionally, they benefit from resource allocation, especially for hot spot areas where crime rates are high hence improving the community safety (Strom, 2017).

References
Dağlar, M., & Argun, U. (2016). Crime mapping and geographical information systems in crime analysis. Journal of Human Sciences, 13(1), 2208-2221.
Hardyns, W., & Rummens, A. (2018). Predictive policing as a new tool for law enforcement? Recent developments and challenges. European journal on criminal policy and research, 24(3), 201-218.
Kim, Y., Kim, G., Lee, Y., & Jang, K. (2020, October). Bandwidth Selection of Kernel Density Estimation for GIS-based Crime Occurrence Map Visualization. In 2020 International Conference on Information and Communication Technology Convergence (ICTC) (pp. 1705-1708). IEEE.
Strom, K. J., & Smith, E. L. (2017). The future of crime data: The National Incident‐Based Reporting System (NIBRS) case as a primary data source for policy evaluation and crime analysis. Criminology & Public Policy, 16(4), 1027-1048.