Taking crime data over a period of time one see the crimes that are being committed. You can see the frequency of the crimes and the times that the crimes are occurring. For example if five reports come in for car break-ins between that occurred between the hours of twelve and six. This shows that we need to step up are patrols in those areas during those times. Now if we have one murder during the same time in the same area which is a more serious crime. That in itself could explain for the car break-ins. A murder investigation is a large investigation and very resource demanding which would pull a lot of the resources off the street. Now the murder is something that is very hard to combat but the car break-ins is not. Now since there was only one murder the frequency of the murder was one the variance was low but the seriousness of the crime was larger than the car break-ins. With the variance formula one can assign values of the crimes and the distance from each other. One can also see the frequency of the crime and direct the available police resources to those affected areas to combat those problems.
