Posted on 08/20/2011 7:57:06 PM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I like the “bait car” shows. Watching the thieves try to lie their way out when every move they made and every word they said was taped.
Actually, with outstanding warrants and drugs you’ve already committed the crime. It is only a matter of being caught.
Columbus, Ohio had a bait car which locked the doors and played the theme to "Cops" on the stereo when the crook started the engine. Nothing like taunting the crook instead of merely arresting him.
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.
Since when is it unusual for cops to investigate suspicious behavior...????
Captain Malinowski been smoking the marijuana they bust people for
Predictive policing is a great idea, but lets not get ridiculous where crime are forecasted like weather
Must be a liberal
It sounds like good police work to me. I would like to see them do more “bait” type work than traffic tickets.
“Must be a liberal “
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.
Like a cat playing with a mouse....
LOL. Great observation!
Have they been watching the TV show “Numbers”?
It's not like weather forecasts are all that accurate.
Good observation, but don't you know crime only occurs because of institutional racism, disfranchisement and class discrimination with a nice helping of white oppression
Only wealth redistribution will fix these problems / S
I was thinking the same thing
I can hear them now:
"Please be careful out there, you have a 40% chance of being mugged between Main street and Broadway between 10:00 am and 2:00 pm "
Actually, temperature, phase of the moon and other things were long ago noticed to have an effect or correlation with higher or lower crime rates and ER admissions. There is a weather effect.
Using patterns of criminal activity as a tool to target areas with a high likelyhood of criminal activity is just efficiently applying tools, and has been done for a while--even before computers were used to chase down the patterns.
Ive always been right on my predictions!
50% chance of rain tomorrow.....
Sounds like they were loitering and trespassing, and therefore subject to detainment and questioning by police under probable cause.
‘Predictive policing’, I like it. It’s a nice pseudonym for profiling and being pro-active.
Just pointing out that nobody actually broke into a car. If you roust a sufficient number of random urbanites, some will have cause for arrest. The police could have done the same without a computer program.
I’d have found this experiment more interesting if the police had held back and seen if there was any actual attempts to break and enter into the vehicles.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.