Administrative Crime Analysis

Administrative Crime Analysis (ACA) typically involves long-range projects, often internal to the particular law enforcement agency. Common practices associated with ACA include providing economic, geographic, and law enforcement information to police management, city hall, city council, neighborhood or citizen groups, or the media. While the results produced from ACA are often the same results that are produced from other analytic approaches, Boba suggested that “information that is chosen for presentation in ACA is typically only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of the research and analysis that are conducted”. For example, law enforcement agencies routinely post information from ACA on their websites in the form of community bulletins, interactive web-based crime incident maps, sex offender locator maps, or agency reports.

Tactical Crime Analysis (TCA) emphasizes collecting data, identifying patterns, and developing possible leads so that criminal cases can be cleared quickly. TCA usually involves analysis of individual, incident-level data associated with specific crime events (e.g., robberies, motor vehicle thefts, and residential burglaries). Analysts engaged in TCA often produce reports containing time series or point-pattern information depicted in charts, graphs, maps, or some combination thereof. In short, TCA is a crime analysis technique that aims to describe and convey information about crime patterns quickly and easily so that the effects of crime fighting and reduction strategies can be maximized.