Police crime analysis: A Survey of us police departments with 100 or more sworn personnel

The quality of police service is a function of the organization's capacity to effectively collect, collate, analyze and disseminate relevant data. Our understanding about the general state of police crime analysis in the USA is limited. We have some data from the LEMAS survey and a good deal of anecdotal information about crime analysis operations. To date, researchers have not engaged in systematic, rigorous efforts to develop a comprehensive sense of various administrative, technological, and operational aspects of the police crime analysis function. In this study, a census of police departments with over 100 sworn personnel was administered (summer 2000). Findings of that survey are reported here.