Greg Ridgeway, Director, Safety and Justice and Center on Quality Policing, RAND Corp.
NIJ Conference 2010
June 14-16

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Predictive Policing: A Forecasting and Prevention Model

Greg Ridgeway, Director, Safety and Justice and Center on Quality Policing, RAND Corp.
NIJ Conference 2010
June 14-16

Greg Ridgeway: Over the last 10 years, police departments have been using constant comp stat models. You're telling captains, “You know, your burglaries are up in your neighborhood. What are you going to do about it?” But that's reacting to last week's problems. The drug markets might have moved on. That burglar has already moved on to the next neighborhood, and so any reaction to those problems is probably already too late.

So predictive policing sort of says, well, perhaps there's something in our data — in our 9-1-1 calls, in the weather, in the patterns that were starting emerging. Can we anticipate crime, so rather than be reactive what the problems were last week, get ahead of that burglar, get ahead of that drug market before it becomes a real problem. And so that's the essence of predictive policing, using data, models and connecting it with a good prevention model to prevent crimes before they happen.

There's one department that we've been working with, has a couple specialty teams — a street drug interdiction unit, a community liaison unit, a community response unit. These are limited resources. There's only five street interdiction officers available. So it's this very valuable, very limited resource. And they're going to put it somewhere. And the police department just simply wants to know, what's the best place to put it? Where are we going to have the greatest impact? And so predictive policing sort of gives them a step up. Here's the place where the drug market's emerging, get your street interdiction unit there. Here's a place where we anticipate a lot of gang activity or gun or shootings, get your community response unit there. Here's where we see a lot of disorder developing, get the community liaison officers in there before the disorder becomes so bad and contaminates the whole neighborhood. So, given that we have limited resources but valuable resources, let's make the most of these resources by using predictive policing to get them in the right places at the right times.

Remember, there's two parts: There's a prediction model and a prevention model. So this is going to be a combined effort between the analysts and researchers developing the best prediction models. We also need those practitioners, those cops who know the streets and know various prevention strategies. And it's going to be a team effort getting those analysts, getting good predictions and the cops coming out with good prevention models to actually make predictive policing have an impact on crime.