Crime Analysts make too many BOLOs

A common product that crime analysts create are called BOLOs – be on the lookout. These are often simple flyers that list information on a recent crime event, with the hope someone in the department will either provide further info (in the case of say an image of a person on CCTV). Or with the hope that patrol will be more vigilant and potentially spot someone in the act in a future similar crime.

Here is an example fake BOLO I had students create in my crime analysis undergrad course for an example:

To be clear I am not saying analysts should never create BOLOs. I do get concerned though when either the majority of an analysts products are BOLOs, or they spend a majority of their time on them. Unfortunately this scenario is not that uncommon.

One reason is that they take almost no technical skill to produce. When I was an analyst at Troy, our Field Intelligence Officer actually took over making bulletins. This same individual would have me send her PNG files, because she did not know how to open PDF files on her phone. It is not good for your career if you spend the majority of your time doing something basically anyone who has used a computer could do.

A second reason is that BOLOs to me are one of the worst ways to communicate information. When you send out multiple emails a day, how many people do you think actually read those emails? That’s right, the analysts that the majority of your products are BOLOs, your emails do not even get opened by the majority of the recipients, and you are treated the same as marketing spam.

The biggest value add an analyst has is that you are the one person in the organization looking at data across multiple incidents in the organization. A patrol officers job is to respond to calls in their beat on their shift, a detectives job is to solve cases they have been assigned. As an analyst you have a higher level view, and so should spot trends that are missed by those individuals, as it is not their job to monitor information outside of their immediate responsibilities. You also should have the technical skills to work with data to be able to do that.

Look I get it – BOLOs are a simple and easy thing to do. Why not send that BOLO out with a blurry CCTV face? One of the mistakes I see many analysts make (not just crime analysts) is to wait to be asked for things. Like we expect patrol officers to proactively patrol hotspots, you as an analyst should be proactive in the types of data you monitor and derivative products you create from that proactive work.

It is hard though to conduct statistical analysis. It requires the analysis to be tightly coupled to what the police department is going to do with that information. No point in making a map of hotspots if there is no institutional commitment from command staff to have patrol officers commit more time to those areas. That said, here are several example activities that I believe are better uses of your time to the department than creating BOLOs.

Monitoring regular crimes for spikes: Imagine going into your command staff meeting and saying “I have identified a major increase in street muggings over the past two months. They are concentrated in district 5 and many tend to happen at 6 or 7 pm.” You can do that if you regularly monitor different crime patterns on your own. See my slides on monitoring temporal crime trends for examples of how I suggest analysts go about that.

Identifying series of repeated crimes: The second step after identifying a spike is to try to identify its cause. A common cause is that one person (or a group of persons) can repeatedly commit the same crime in the same area over an extended period of time. So once you identify a spike in street muggings, you should take time to try to review the cases to see if they are a pattern and possibly committed by the same individuals. Once you have those cases, you may alert detectives if a new event in the series occurs, or work with whoever is assigning detective cases to prioritize solving those events.

OSINT monitoring: I am a bit old now, when I was an analyst we would monitor Facebook for events, such as gang members posting pictures of weapons, advertising parties, or discussing beefs with rival gangs. The medium has likely changed, but I am guessing people are still posting things they should not be to the public internet. Monitoring that information and giving specific units that intel when it happens (gang unit, special investigators, school resource officers) can be quite useful. Note that is to the specific people who will find it useful, not blasted to the entire department.

Hot people and places: So we all know about hotspots, you can also do the same analysis of repeat offenders, or the combination of the two (see Tamara Herold’s place based networks work). Like I said earlier, you can make hotspots, but you need some mechanism to get officers to act on that information. Just sending a map will not by itself cause any downstream action. If you are having a hard time with this in your organization, I would sit down with your chief or captain of the detectives and tell them you can get this information, how can they better leverage you. It may be your captain over the detectives likes the idea of you doing a deep dive into a specific problem property. Or it may be the chief wants you to work with the traffic unit to implement DDACTS. Once you get top-down buy in, it is easier to prioritize data analysis products.

One thing to note here, some analysts may be thinking “I did those things and put them in a BOLO!”. If you have a longer analysis piece, sending out a BOLO like flyer is fine, but you should consider additional mediums to deliver that message. Whether at regular command staff meetings, going to roll call and telling patrol directly, or in some cases even going to community meetings and letting the local groups know about a crime problem (and what they can do to help). You should not just be sending out emails.

A second point for the analysts spending a majority of their time on bulletins, like the field intel officer I worked with that made her own bulletins, there is no reason why others in your agency cannot do their own bulletins if they feel something is important. There are software vendors now that make it even simpler, but all one needs is a word processor. You do not have a monopoly on crime analysis, and it is a good thing if others in the organization want to take a more active role. So if you are getting a ton of requests, the best response may be to train the people requesting to do the analysis themselves, or make a simple tool to allow them to do that.