Crime Prediction

pipingguy writes "More than a decade of extensive crime data collection matched with new technology may soon allow police to predict to a surprising degree of accuracy the number and type of crimes that will occur in a given neighborhood one month in advance."

Comments

Potential for abuse

[AEton]

So, if I want to stage a robbery, now I should find out where the least likely spots are for said robbery, demographically (do they have to publicize the specific information they gather? Civil liberties advocates would probably push it)--and then commit crime where they expect it least. Such a system, if acted upon in the manner suggested, would allow an informed criminal (or gang of criminals!) to act with even less resistance than before. That's the major flaw with demographic information, of course; it only gives averages and likely outcomes. But "they" (local police forces who use this information) will have to be careful in how they use it, because an overreliance on statistics means that the outlier criminal could take away someone's life or property with little chance of being caught.

Re:I liked this better

[ichimunki]

They aren't going to be able to stop crimes before they happen, because that's impossible (unless you count mitigating the factors that cause crime, like poverty or mental illness). If you stop it before it happens, then it hasn't happened.

The only concern I have about this is that it will heighten the notions of where to send police in the first place. In Minneapolis we have a system called CODEFOR that is used to help police track crime and prioritize resources, but it's based (I believe) on reported crime. That's quite different than using statistical measures like arrest rates to project crime rates and send police into an area based on that. One has to be very careful, since using the results of this to direct limited police resources could influence the numbers that go into the model in the first place (feedback looping).

Luckily, the people the article talks about were using a wide variety of inputs (not just police or crime-related) to what are likely a host of regression analyses.