The problem for reporters and policymakers evaluating the efefctiveness of predictive policing, is that the vast majority of what we know about predictive policing comes from data released unilaterally by individual police agencies, or by the firms peddling software to them. This not only makes it hard to compare results from city to city, but raises serious questions of data reliability.
RAND criminologist Jessica Saunders says this about the value of current data on predictive policing:
I think that there are very interesting anecdotes out there that should be followed up, but as researchers we try to get at the causal mechanisms of crime reductions, and a lot of these initial releases don’t get there.
Saunders and a team of researchers are now working to shed new light on the field with the first comprehensive, multi-site study on the impact of predictive policing.
A preliminary report from this multi-study is available: Evaluation of the Shreveport Predictive Policing Experiment.
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