This looks very promising, that is if the stats released by LAPD are to be believed.
CRIME PREDICTION TOOL PILOT SUCCESSFUL
Innovative new software has been shown to predict crime before it has actually happened
Police Oracle
August 9, 2012
A crime prediction tool has been successfully piloted by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).
Several years ago, it challenged a team comprising two mathematicians, a criminologist, and an anthropologist to come up with a way to prevent crime before it happens. The result is PredPol, designed to put police on the scene before crime happens. It led to a 12 per cent drop in crime in the Foothill Division of Los Angeles and a 27 per cent drop in crime in Santa Cruz.
The program is built around the same model for predicting aftershocks following an earthquake. It shows officers what could be coming based on simple, constantly calibrated data on the location, time and type of crime. It then creates prediction boxes – as small as 500 square feet – on a patrol map.
The system was devised by Jeff Brantingham, an anthropology professor at the University of California in Los Angeles. It uses data is taken from repeat victims of crime. He said that traditional mapping tools are calibrated less frequently, rely on humans to recognize patterns, and allocate resources based on past crimes rather than predicted offences.
So far, the program has been implemented in five LAPD divisions covering 130 square miles and roughly 1.3 million people. In the Foothill Division, where more than half of crimes are property-related, around 170 patrol officers are spending a total of about 70 hours a week working in the prediction boxes.
LAPD Captain Sean Malinowski said he envisions a time when the police will issue crime forecasts in the same way as the weather service issues storm alerts.
PredPol data can be accessed through any hand held mobile data device and is run on a secure, cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
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