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All trade-mark (TM) rights associated with the brand name products in this ad belong to their respective owners. *Generic drugs are carefully regulated medications that have the same active ingredients as the original brand name drug, but are generally cheaper in price. Generic equivalents are equal to their "brand" counterparts in Active Ingredients, Dosage, Safety, Strength, Quality, Performance and Intended use. It may vary in colour, shape, size, cost and appearance. TerriAnn in Torrance By TerriAnn Ferren Photo by TerriAnn Ferren A few weeks ago at the Torrance Police Department Awards and Appreciation Luncheon, I met one of the recipients of this year’s Special Recognition Awards, Senior Administrative Crime Analyst Suzanne Kramer. It was at that moment, I decided to make time to speak with Suzanne and find out exactly what she does for the Police Department. Last week I visited the Torrance Police Department (TPD) and was escorted into the office of Suzanne Kramer. Suzanne was born in Germany, the daughter of an Air Force fighter pilot, but has lived in the South Bay since she was two years old. Smiling, Suzanne pointed to a picture of her father on her desk and said, “That’s my hero.” Although Suzanne has been working for the TPD for twenty-six years, she never thought she would be working in the department while studying Communications at USC. “I couldn’t have been happier in hindsight to end up where I ended up because I absolutely love what I do and I have no regrets whatsoever,” said Suzanne. She then told me that crime analysis is quite different today than it was when she started her career twenty-six years ago. As we all can imagine, there was a transition with 9-11. The importance of the analyst within numerous organizations from the local, to the state, to the federal, even in private industry, rose in importance and is very much a part of operations. The biggest weakness post 9-11 was the fact that nobody was connecting the dots of all the information that was available. Suzanne said, “The information was there, it just wasn’t being put together. That is the job of analysts, to connect the dots and put data points together and take large volumes of data and drill down and make something of it.” Wow, that sounds fascinating and now I see why so many television crime shows from CSI Miami, NCIS, NCIS Los Angeles, and NCIS New Orleans all have crime-analyst characters that sift and sort through multiple data banks. When I asked Suzanne how she felt about so many crime analysts showing up as a major part of todays television shows she smiled and said, “Post 9-11 you saw this explosion of the impetus toward analysts and there is that age-old question, does life emulate art or vice versa, and I have thought long and hard about that. I really think art does emulate life ‘cuz TV started mirroring that and it was already happening. But the one funny thing when I tell people what I do is that – they say, ‘oh, you collect blood splatter and the evidence’ and I say no, those are crime scene investigators – I am an analyst of crime. Why that’s important is I don’t hear that much anymore because mainstream society is now well versed on analysts, crime analysts, and intelligence analysts vs. crime scene analysts – two different things.” As I spoke with Suzanne, I found out she watches the television crime shows and finds them fascinating and told me they have done a good job of showing what she does. The TPD does a fantastic job of monitoring, documenting, and then accessing crimes, criminals, and crime trends within the department to keep all of us safe. I was learning so much from Suzanne and realized why there are so many crime shows on television. This was exciting stuff! After 9-11, many reports came out confirming the fact that the police/fire/rescue/ emergency responses, etc. needed updating to keep all concerned agencies in the same loop. “It wasn’t a shift so much for me personally because I was already doing what I do but for the profession, but it was a profound shift and the number of analyst positions just exploded at all those levels [city, state, federal] because it was understood just how important it was. And it’s not in place of anybody or anything – it was to augment. And civilian analyst free up the sworn officers to do their jobs they were trained for in the field as opposed to sitting behind a desk and working with the reams of data,” added Suzanne. What kind of data does Suzanne have to draw from and what does she look for in her work, I wondered? “When you talk about a crime analyst, you talk about an individual who tracks crime patterns, crime series, and crime trends. In addition to that you have your wanted subjects and your serial offender profiling, so what I do is within the city of Torrance, I keep my finger on the pulse as to what is going on,” said Suzanne. Each day, each week, and each month there is a bit of a shift because what she does is dictated by what the criminals are doing. Her focus is on what the serial criminals are doing, not the one time criminal or the once in a while criminal. She reviews daily crime reports, arrest reports, and the information that comes in about what is going on throughout the day. She focuses on the series, and then drills down, identifying the series, where it is happening, geographically, what times of day, what days of week, what is the modus operandi? If it is forcing entry into a structure - how is that being accomplished? Is it by a window? Is it by a door? Is it by prying? Is it by smashing? By taking all the pieces she knows, and putting them together with additional reports she adds, Suzanne can have a pretty clear idea of the criminal. So by working and networking with other agencies, near and far – Suzanne collects additional pieces and identifies parts of a series. “Perhaps one agency was able to report a suspect vehicle description, perhaps another agency was able to document a weapon description – depending upon what crime it is – you don’t always have weapons you don’t always have vehicles – but as an analyst, you just keep plugging in to develop more and more profile of the series, and my job is to provide that to the patrol officer – that is my target audience. My target customer is mostly the investigators because it’s after they have gone through the reports and they have identified what they have as workable and non-workable, I then get the go-ahead to put out the information I’ve been able to compile to the patrol officer which are the first line to actually interact with, make contact with, to potentially stop the behavior of the criminal. They then know which areas to give special patrols to, what is the subject they are looking for, and it gives them probable cause to be able to find the criminal for whatever series it is,” said Suzanne. Got that? The city of Torrance is a very, very safe city. Suzanne told me, “Historically speaking (without having access to raw numbers at my fingertips at this moment), crime was higher when I started. It started . . . maybe the early 2000s to decline, and that was pretty much countywide. We experienced a lot of decline in crime – and it wasn’t huge percentages – but it was a steady percentage. And then things have started to change within the last couple of years with the realignment of AB109. That is very problematic for us in Suzanne Kramer, Senior Administrative Crime Analyst for Torrance Police Department. See TerriAnn, page 10
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