Analysts often examine hot spots by use of geography alone. This can often be a useful starting point, but to reduce or eliminate the hot spot you must look deeper to understand why it is a hot spot. We focus on developing an understanding of the processes that create hot spots. Later, in Steps 23 and 55, we examine how to analyze and map hot spots without letting your mapping software call the shots. As we have seen in previous steps, small areas - places - are critical to understanding many problems and developing effective responses. We, therefore, focus on hot spot places in this step. In later steps we will build on this idea to examine hot spot streets and areas.

A problem is a recurring set of related harmful events in a community that members of the public expect the police to address. This definition draws attention to the six required elements of a problem: Community; Harm; Expectation; Events; Recurring; and Similarity. These elements are captured by the acronym CHEERS:

Your department will sometimes mount a crackdown on a particular crime such as auto crime or burglary, and you might be asked to map these offenses or provide other data to support the operation. But these categories are too broad for problem-oriented policing. They include too many different kinds of crimes, all of which need to be separately analyzed. For example, "auto crime" could include: