Hey Tom. Good question. We do a number of things to analyze crashes.
One current trend is The Systemic Approach to Safety . We use network screening tools such as Safety Analyst to look for trends and risks that can be mitigated.
Of course we all like hot spot maps, we use a hot spot mapping process/forumla to decide where to put deer crossing signs, but the deer never follow our directions anyways, so that's really pointless.
We've been experimenting with mapping apps including using the ESRI APIs, CARTO, using our business intelligence platform, and IBM Watson. The Watson thing is pretty good at predictive analytics and our public accidents service happened to be formatted in such a way that it was ready to go for Watson. Watson tells us what we already know, but with science and statistics!
That's system wide analysis, we also do other types of analysis for road designs, performance measures, quality control. We've really been looking at the quality of our data and data processes lately, and looking at ways to improve our ability to collect better information to analyze. This is a resource we've been studying - Model Performance Measures for State Traffic Records Systems, and in the long run we are setting ourselves up to support better linking traffic records systems.