Los Angeles police predict crime before it happens

LOS ANGELES: The 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 burglars. Time Magazine called it one of the best inven- tions of 2011.

Early successes could serve as a model for other cashstrapped 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 programme was launched late last year, officers are seeing double-digit drops in burglaries and other property crimes. The programme has turned enough in-house skeptics into believers that there are plans to roll it out citywide by next summer.

“We have prevented hundreds and hundreds of people coming home and seeing their homes robbed,” said police Capt. Sean Malinowski.

Crime mapping has long been a tool used to determine where the bad guys lurk. The idea has evolved from coloured pins placed on a map to identifying “hot spots” via a computer database based on past crimes and possible patterns.

Over the past decade, many large police departments, including Los Angeles and New York City, have used CompStat, a system that tracks crime figures and enables police to send extra officers to trouble spots.

The new program used by LAPD and police in the Northern California city of Santa Cruz is more timely and precise, proponents said. Built on the same model for predicting aftershocks following an earthquake, the software promises to show officers what might be coming based on simple, constantly calibrated data — location, time and type 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 goal is not to boost the number of arrests, a common police benchmark to reflect crime reduction. Officers want to either intercept a crime in progress or deter would-be criminals.

“I want to disrupt an activity before an arrest is made,” Malinowski said. “You can’t arrest your way out of some of these problems.”