Predictive Practices

Assignment 1: Predictive Policing

CIS – 500: Information System Decision Making

April 15th 2014

In a perfect world, police officers would be able to arrive on the scene of a crime the instant the crime is attempted. The unfortunate fact is that we do not live in a perfect world. Though out history police departments around the world have invested great time and effort into trying to identify potential criminals and anticipate crimes before they are able to carry out their offense. Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes series, modeled imparted his main character with the practice of deductive reasoning, a practice that was becoming popular among police detectives at Scotland Yard in the mid eighteen hundreds. The character, Holmes, would make his conclusions based on a vast amount of knowledge he would gather from information, most would consider irrelevant, which when used in combination would lead directly to the culprit. Moving forward in time to the twentieth century, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) would gather massive files on individuals in the hope that if would lead to the identification of patterns among criminal minds, thus helping to identify criminals.

Police started gathering and retaining information about crimes in the hope that they could identify the contributing factors to a criminal event. Other alternate method of crime prevention would be to simply place police officers randomly within the precinct and hope they would be nearby in the event a crime is committed. In 1994, the program introduced by William Bratton, Police commissioner of New York, presented a data-driven management tool in the New York City Police Department called COMPSTAT, which is supposedly responsible for a decrease in crime in the years since (University of Maryland, 2014). The program uses information gathered from previous crimes, as well as the addresses of criminals to help the police identify...