I tend to get about one email per week asking for help. Majority of folks are either students asking for general research advice, or individuals who came across my webpage asking for advice about code.

This is great, and everyone should always feel open to send me an email. The utility of me answering these questions (for everyone) are likely greater than spending time working on a paper, so I do not mind at all. I can currently keep up with the questions given the volume (but not by much, and is dependent on how busy I am with other work/family things). Worst case I will send an email response that says sorry I cannot respond to this anytime soon.

Many times there are other forums though for people to post questions that are ultimately better. One, I participate in many of these, so it is not like sending an email just to me, it is like sending an email to me + 40 other people who can answer your question. Also from my perspective it is better to answer a question once in one of these forums, than repeat the same answer a dozen different times. (Many times I write a blog post if I get the same question multiple times.)

While the two groups overlap a bit, I separate out resources aimed at criminologists (as typically more interested in research and are current master/PhD students), whereas crime analysts are embedded in a criminal justice agency.

For Criminologists

For resources on where to ask questions, Jacob Kaplan recently created a slack channel, crimhelp.slack.com. It has been joined by a variety of criminologists, folks in think tanks/research institutes, current graduate students, and some working crime analysts. It is new, but you can go and peruse the topics so far, they are pretty wide in scope.

So that forum you can really ask about anything crim related, the remaining resources are more devoted towards programming/statistical analysis.

If you are interested in statistical or programming questions, I used to participate in StackOverflow, Cross Validated (the stats site), and the GIS site. They are good places to check out prior answers, and are worth a shot asking a question on occasion. For tricky python or R coding questions that are small in scope, StackOverflow is excellent. Anything more complicated it is more hit or miss.

Many programming languages have their own question boards. Stata and SPSS are ones I am familiar with and tend to receive good responses (I still actively participate in the SPSS board). If I’m interested in learning some new command/library in Stata, I often just search the forum for posts related to it to check it out in the wild.

For programming questions, it is often useful to create a minimal reproducible example to describe the problem, show what the input data looks like and how you want the output data to look like. (In fact on the forums I link to you will almost always be asked explicitly to do that.)

For Crime Analysts

In similar spirit to the crim slack channel, Police Rewired has a Discord group for crime analysts (not 100% sure who started it, Andreas Varotsis is one of the people involved though). So that was founded by some UK analysts, but there are US analysts participating as well (and the problems folks deal with are very similar, so no real point in making a distinction between US/UK).

For crime analysts in the US, you should likely join either the IACA or a local crime analyst network. Many of the local ones come bundled, so if you join the Texas analyst network TXLEAN you also automatically get an IACA membership. To join is cheap (especially for current students). IACA has also started a user question forum as well.

For folks looking to get an entry level gig, the IACA has a job board that is really good. So it is worth the $10 just for that. They have various other intro resources though as well. For current BA/Masters students who are looking to get a job, I also suggest applying to private sector analyst jobs as well. They are mostly exchangeable with a crime analyst role. (Think more excel jockey than writing detailed statistic programming.)

How I learn to code

What prompted this blog post is that I’ve gotten asked by maybe 5 different people in the past month or so asking for resources to learn about statistical programming. And honestly I do not have a good answer, I’ve never really sat down with a book and learned a statistical software (tried on a few occasions and failed). I’m always just project focused.

So I wanted to do an example conjunctive analysis, or deep learning with pytorch, or using conformal prediction intervals to generate synthetic control estimates, etc. So I just sat down and figured out how to do those specific projects using various resources around the internet. One of my next personal projects is going to estimate prediction intervals for logistic multilevel models using Julia (based on this very nice set of intros to the language). I also need to get a working familiarity with Tableau. (Both are related to projects I am doing at work.) So expect to see a Tableau dashboard on the blog sometime in the near future!

Also many statistical programming languages are pretty much exchangeable for the vast majority of tasks people do. You can see that I have example blog posts for Excel, Access/SQL, R, SPSS, Stata, python, and ArcGIS. Just pick one and figure it for a particular project.

For criminologists, I have posted my Phd research course materials, and for Crime Analysts I have posted my GIS Class and my Crime Analysis course materials (although the GIS course is already out of date, it uses Arc Desktop instead of ArcPro). I don’t suggest you sit down and go through the courses though page-by-page. What I more suggest is look at the table of contents, see if anything strikes your fancy, read that particular lecture/code, and if you want to apply it to your own projects try to work it out. (At least that is how I go about learning coding.)

If you want more traditional learning materials for learning how to do code (e.g. textbooks or online courses), I suggest you ask folks on those forums I mentioned. They will likely be able to provide much better advice than I would.

To end it is totally normal to want to ask questions, get advice, or get feedback. Both my experience in Academia and in Crime Analysis it can be very lonely (I was in a small department, so was the only analyst). Folks on these forums are happy to help and connect.