Los Angeles police are aiming to beat suspects to the scene of a crime by utilizing computers to predict exactly where trouble may take place.
The Los Angeles Police Department is the largest agency to embrace an experiment known as “predictive policing,” which crunches information to decide where to send officers to thwart would-be thieves and burglars. Time Magazine referred to as it one of the best inventions of 2011.
Early successes could serve as a model for other money-strapped law enforcement agencies, but some legal observers are concerned it could lead to unlawful stops and searches that violate Fourth Amendment protections.
In the San Fernando Valley, where the program was launched late last year, officers are seeing double-digit drops in burglaries and other property crimes. The program has turned enough in-house skeptics into believers that there are plans to roll it out citywide by next summer time.
“We have prevented hundreds and hundreds of folks coming residence and seeing their homes robbed,” said police Capt. Sean Malinowski.
Crime mapping has extended been a tool used to determine where the bad guys lurk. The concept has evolved from colored pins placed on a map to identifying “hot spots” by way of a computer database based on past crimes and achievable patterns.
Over the past decade, a lot of big police departments, which includes Los Angeles and New York City, have utilised CompStat, a system that tracks crime figures and enables police to send extra officers to trouble spots.
The new program utilized by LAPD and police in the Northern California city of Santa Cruz is much more timely and precise, proponents said. Built on the identical model for predicting aftershocks following an earthquake, the computer software promises to show officers what may possibly be coming based on simple, consistently calibrated information — location, time and sort of crime.
The software generates prediction boxes — as small as 500 square feet — on a patrol map. When officers have spare time, they are told to “go in the box.”
The objective is not to boost the quantity of arrests, a common police benchmark to reflect crime reduction. Officers want to either intercept a crime in progress or deter would-be criminals.
Sources and more information:
• Real life ‘Minority Report’, Sci-fi policing: predicting crime before it occurs
LOS ANGELES (AP) – Los Angeles police are aiming to beat suspects to the scene of a crime by using computers to predict where trouble might occur. The Los Angeles Police Department is the largest agency to embrace an experiment known as “predictive policing,” which crunches data to determine where to send officers to thwart would-be thieves and..