It’s not quite Minority Report, but the L.A. Times reports that the LAPD is working with UCLA mathematicians to pursue a sophisticated form of predictive policing. In the not-too-distant future, “automated, detailed crime forecasts tailored to each of the department’s 21 area stations would be streamed several times a day to commanders,” with consolidating information from detectives, witnesses, suspects, and victims fed into a centralized database. Researchers George Mohler and Martin Short‘s models suggest “thinking of crimes the way seismologists think of earthquakes and aftershocks.” [%comments]
When the Prediction Fits the Crime
TAGS: crime, statistics
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Map the STD cases. Done.
As a general rule, crooks are better at hacking than cops are at computer security.
Any hacker worth his salt will be able to intercept the forecasts, which will tell him where police will be concentrating today – and more importantly, where they won’t be. He’ll then be able to sell this information to any burglars and muggers who might want it.
A variant of this scenario also always struck me as the biggest flaw in last year’s briefly fashionable “online crime maps’. What happened to them?
I hope rocket scientists do better here than what they did in measuring risks of financial assets.
so much for the Consistution and being innocent until proven guilty.
Since they have a ‘formula’ to know where to go for crimes, couldn’t a smart hacker break into the computer system and get that formula? Then they may know where police would be, and where they wouldn’t.
This sounds like a violation of citizens’ right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. The police aren’t supposed to “predict” crimes. They are supposed to serve and protect by pursuing justice after the crimes have occurred. This sucks at times, but it’s really important in protecting the rights of criminals, which are more often at risk than the rights of presumably law-abiding citizens/first time offenders. Not to sound alarmist, or to question the motives of the LAPD, but if we start infringing on the rights of an already at-risk group, then everyone else’s rights are at risk, too.