By the numbers: Cape PD adds crime-data analyst to its staff

If knowledge is power, it might explain the Cape Girardeau Police Department’s recent push to harness data’s crime-fighting potential.

The department has created a new position, crime analyst, and in April appointed Cpl. Ryan Droege to the job, whom police chief Wes Blair called “scary smart.”

Droege, a Southeast Missouri State University alum who’s been with the police department six years, said his new job so far has entailed lots of learning.

“It’s a brand-new field for us,” he said. “I’m doing a lot of real-world learning using our data and using our cases and using what our officers are working on, so it’s a dual purpose; it’s not purely academic for me.”

He said the duties of a crime analyst are multi-faceted, but they start with data-crunching and end with trying to engineer productive applications of the results.

“[It’s] looking for connections that might have been missed somewhere else or looking for any sort of pattern or any information of value,” he said. “It’s a burgeoning field in the law-enforcement sector. I’d say most places our size and up have crime analysts or have someone who works in that capacity.”

Crime analysts, he said, can help stop crimes before they happen, as well as help provide department leaders the information they need to most efficiently deploy resources.

People sometimes make so-called common-sense decisions based on assumptions that might not be borne out by the data.

That’s where Droege comes in.

“It’s good to be able to see what the true numbers are,” he said.

The idea high tide for DWI arrests is about 1 a.m. on the weekends in the downtown area, he said, may seem like a no-brainer, but it still is important to double-check the math.

Most people, including officers, might overestimate the frequency of other calls that seem equally commonplace, Droege explained.

Take service calls to Walmart, for example.

While frequent, those calls account for only 1 percent of the total.

“It’s good to have someone who can look at that at a real-data level and make an analysis off that,” Droege said.

He said the process of getting his master’s degree in public administration helped prepare him for his new role, but he was quick to add he still is trying to attune his analytical skills to the criminal-justice setting.

“I knew some cornerstones of research method. I knew some methodology and some of the philosophy behind statistics but no real-world application of them,” he said. “Now I have more than I ever thought I would have in terms of stats and all that.”

He already has experienced some success identifying patterns in actual cases, most recently in the Traveler’s Gazebo fire.

“Say three houses burned in a time. Well, that’s a pattern, but it’s only a series if you know it’s the same person. So that’s part of the analysis work — to review each case, to review the circumstances, the M.O. and all that,” he said. “In this case, everything lined up and led us to believe it’s probably the same person doing this.”

Droege said given the right raw data and “some fancy math work,” a good crime analyst can generate predictions that, more often than not, are right.

“It’s better than 50-50. You know, you get about 68 percent probability that it’s going to happen within this sector, within this date range, within this time range, is about as close as we can get,” he said. “I know TV makes it seem like we can [determine], ‘9 p.m. on Thursday, he’ll be there.’ If you have enough data, you can get that close, but that’s very rare in this field.”

Droege said his goals for the next year are to keep learning, earn a few more certifications and begin identifying quantifiable problems and developing long-term solutions.

“I’m starting to make some good progress, I feel,” he said.

tgraef@semissourian.com

(573) 388-3627