Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes – The Markup

SoundThinking, a law enforcement technology company previously known as ShotSpotter, has hired Geolitica’s engineering team, but not its senior leadership, and is in the process of acquiring some of its intellectual property. The lengths of these prediction windows was a major problem, American University law professor Andrew Ferguson, who authored the book The Rise of Big Data Policing, told The Markup after being informed of our findings. Instead, officials said all of the instances when the automated monitoring system tagged police vehicles as having visited a prediction location were coincidental overlaps that naturally occurred as officers regularly traveled across the geographically small, largely suburban community. “I train our 100+ officers on how to patrol PredPol boxes and I love our successes.” In an email to The Markup, Guarino wrote that he wasn’t familiar with the incident Brown, who retired in 2018, mentioned and didn’t “know how Sgt. In her 2019 master’s thesis for the Naval Postgraduate School, Ana Lalley, police chief of Elgin, Ill., wrote critically about her department’s experience with the software, which left officers unimpressed.