Evaluation of the efficiency and quality in structured crime reports

TL;DR

This study compares a new structured crime reporting method with traditional text reports, finding it more efficient and capable of capturing nearly three times more relevant crime scene details, thus improving report quality and saving law enforcement resources.

Contribution

The paper introduces and evaluates a novel structured crime report method, demonstrating its superior efficiency and detail registration over traditional text-based reports.

Findings

Structured method is significantly more efficient (p < 0.05).

Registers 2.96 times more relevant crime details.

Potential resource savings of 11-30 full-time positions annually.

Abstract

This work evaluates a novel structured method for reporting crime and registering crime scene data by comparing the method with traditional text-based crime reports. Swedish law enforcement officers were asked to register a residential burglary using both methods in order to measure the effectiveness of each method. The effectiveness was quantified as both the time it took to register the crime as well as the number of relevant unique crime scene details that were collected. The results show the structured method to be significantly more efficient than traditional text-based crime reports (p < 0.05). Also, the novel method registers 2.96 times more relevant and unique crime scene details on average. In addition to the differences in efficiency this work also discusses more qualitative pros and cons with the novel method, as well as various data analysis methods that could be used on the registered data. It is concluded that the novel method can benefit law enforcement agencies in two ways. First, related to increased quality and more elaborate crime reports. Secondly, related to significant time-savings, which according to a rough estimate is expect to lie in the range 11-30 full-time positions per year for Swedish law enforcement agencies, particularly for volume crime categories. Those resources could instead be used for unburden the workload for our law enforcement officers, and to some extent free resources that could be used in other parts of the organization. Note: this pre-print manuscript is written in Swedish.