Predictive policing is the application of statistical methods, often on incombination with what is generally referred to as “big data”, in law enforcement to identify likely targets for police intervention (the predictions). Predictive policing includes methods for predicting locations of crimes, methods for predicting offenders' identities, and methods for predicting victim's identities.
Many of the methods used in predictive policing and big data analysis seems problematic from a political and ethical perspective, but in addition, we need to know more about the effectiveness of these methods. Currently, most of the reports about the effects of these methods comes from data released unilaterally by individual police agencies, or by the firms providing software for these types of analysis. These reports tend to be anecdotal, incomplete, and without scientific controls. This not only makes it hard to evaluate the results, but also raises serious questions regarding data reliability.
This web-site is set up by Gisle Hannemyr (a researcher at the University of Oslo) and is intended to become a curated, crowdsourced repository or annotated bibliography of scholarly papers, theses and books and other resources about predictive policing and big data analysis. The overall goal is to make the resources that exist easier to locate.
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