When the Prediction Fits the Crime

It’s not quite Minority Report, but the L.A. Times reports that the LAPD is working with UCLA mathematicians to pursue a sophisticated form of predictive policing. In the not-too-distant future, “automated, detailed crime forecasts tailored to each of the department’s 21 area stations would be streamed several times a day to commanders,” with consolidating information from detectives, witnesses, suspects, and victims fed into a centralized database. Researchers George Mohler and Martin Short‘s models suggest “thinking of crimes the way seismologists think of earthquakes and aftershocks.” [%comments]