An Actual Way to Use Reported Crime Data to Prevent Crime

Aaron Sankin: A company called Geolitica developed an algorithm that predicts where and when crimes will occur. He says the company suggested sending police officers to these “hot spots” to [prevent crimes through law enforcement presence] But predictive policing doesn’t consider why these hot spots of reported crimes exist in the first place, he says. Sanksin: Rutgers developed a tool that can identify why crime might be clustering in a particular location.

Hi everyone,

It’s Markup reporter Aaron Sankin again. In early October, I published an investigation into a predictive policing algorithm from a company called Geolitica, formerly known as PredPol. We compared the algorithm’s predictions on where and when crimes were most likely to occur to actual crime reports made to the police. Based on our analysis, those predictions were correct less than 1% of the time.

We got our ...