Sending the Police Before There’s a Crime

New York Times ^ | August 15, 2011 | ERICA GOODE

[nickcarraway]

The arrests were routine. Two women were taken into custody after they were discovered peering into cars in a downtown parking garage in Santa Cruz, Calif. One woman was found to have outstanding warrants; the other was carrying illegal drugs.

But the presence of the police officers in the garage that Friday afternoon in July was anything but ordinary: They were directed to the parking structure by a computer program that had predicted that car burglaries were especially likely there that day.

The program is part of an unusual experiment by the Santa Cruz Police Department in predictive policing — deploying officers in places where crimes are likely to occur in the future.

In July, Santa Cruz began testing the prediction method for property crimes like car and home burglaries and car thefts. So far, said Zach Friend, the police department’s crime analyst, the program has helped officers pre-empt several crimes and has led to five arrests.

The notion of predictive policing is attracting increasing attention from law enforcement agencies around the country as departments struggle to fight crime at a time when budgets are being slashed.

“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,” Mr. Friend said. “So we have to deploy our resources in a more effective way, and we thought this model would help.”

Efforts to systematically anticipate when and where crimes will occur are being tried out in several cities. The Chicago Police Department, for example, created a predictive analytics unit last year.

[DB]

One already had an outstanding warrant. They can haul her off as soon as they identify her.

[ApplegateRanch]

but don't you know crime only occurs because of institutional racism, disfranchisement and class discrimination with a nice helping of white oppression

...and so it doesn't take a computer program to know enough to place plainclothesmen in the projects, the "ghettoes" and the "barrios" and their fringes.

It also doesn't take a program to look at a spike in reports in an area, to know that it should be staked out around the days/times that the reports cluster.

Used to be SOP...at least for Joe Friday, et al, long before computers needed less than an icehouse & ton of punch cards, let alone just a lap to sit on.

[Oztrich Boy]

Two women were taken into custody after they were discovered peering into cars

Wasn't that the excuse for the beatings of Richard Long, and Kelly Thomas?

[DeltaZulu]

Fantastic point. Predictive policing would identify muslim men between the ages of 19 and 45 being the most likely to hijack aircraft and hence the TSA should screen them more thoroughly. I move we stop calling it profiling and call it predictive policing.

[Scotsman will be Free]

Sounds like this program is simply an electronic “pin map” with the addition of yet another govt. employee to run it.

[11johara28]

“I’ve noticed that liberals tend to view crime like weather, something that just happens rather than as a series of decisions and actions by people.”

Excellent point. And they also believe that if they just spread the wealth, crime would go away.

They refuse to acknowledge that it just might be that there are bad people in this world.

I don’t know who first said that a “conservative is a liberal who just got mugged” but he/she sure was on point.