Police Departments nationwide have been using data and statistics to drive policing since the 90s in an approach founded by the NYPD named CompStat was credited with dramatic reductions in crime and increases in efficiency. CompStat, a process and philosophy rather than a single technology or software, uses databases and GIS to record and track criminal and police activity and identify areas that are lagging or need more attention. While it provides much more information than “primal policing”, CompStat has advanced little beyond simple spreadsheets and mapping software. Inspired by recent innovations in Big Data and Apache Hadoop and businesses like Walmart or Amazon using analytics to determine future demand, departments across the country and worldwide are looking to take this approach to the next level and go from tracking crime to predicting it.
The first department to adopt this strategy was Santa Cruz through their city-wide 6 month Predictive Policing Experiment, named one to Time Magazine’s 50 best innovations of 2011. (more on smartdatacollective.com)
