Can Software that Predicts Crime Pass Constitutional Muster?
Photo Credit: APTypically, police arrive at the scene of a crime after it occurs. But rather than send cops to yesterday’s crime, a new trend in law enforcement is using computers to predict where tomorrow’s crimes will be — and then try to head them off.
The software uses past statistics to project where crime is moving. Police in Los Angeles say it’s worked well in predicting property crimes there. Now Seattle is about to expand it for use in predicting gun violence.
It all started as a research project. Jeff Brantingham, an anthropologist at UCLA, wanted to see if computers could model future crime the same way they model earthquake aftershocks. Turns out they can.
“It predicts sort of twice as much crime as any other existing system, even going head-to-head with a crime analyst,” Brantingham says…
Brantingham and his colleagues are now selling the predictive system to police departments with the name PredPol. At this point, you may be thinking about the sci-fi movie Minority Report. But this is different. No psychics sleeping in bathtubs, for one. More to the point, this doesn’t predict who will commit a future crime, just where it is likely to happen.
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