Like a scene straight from Minority Report, police departments are looking into policing based on future indicators.
Erica Goode, writing for the The New York Times, reports on predictive policing. Predictive policing is the new term for deploying officers in places where crimes are most likely to happen in the future based on several indicators. The new program is a part of something called an “unusual experiment” by the Santa Cruz Police Department.
This new form of policing is gaining the attention of law enforcement agencies because of the difficulty of trying to balance the budget and fight crime with fewer staff.
Zach Friend, the police department’s crime analyst says, “We’re facing a situation where we have 30 percent more calls for service but 20 percent less staff than in the year 2000, and that is going to continue to be our reality . . . so we have to deploy our resources in a more effective way, and we thought this model would help.”
Attempting to anticipate crimes is being researched in other cities as well. Chicago’s police department installed a predictive analytics system this past year.
Mr. Friend points out that the early reports were encouraging. Burglaries were down 27 percent in July compared with July of the previous year. It seems predictive policing is at least serving as a deterrent.
Predicting crime with computer programs is not unlike the technology companies like Wal-Mart use to predict buying habits of customers. The Times article mentions that law enforcement agencies have great amounts of data that can be used to feed predictive policing systems. As the article also points out, “it’s much cheaper to prevent a crime than to solve a crime. . . .” and that speaks volumes in this economic climate.
We like the idea of being smart on crime.