The Santa Cruz Experiment: Can a City's Crime Be Predicted and Prevented?
By turning its crime problem into a data problem, Santa Cruz is reinventing police work for the 21st century Last year the criminals of Santa Cruz, California, stole 160 cars and committed 495 burglaries. For a city of 60,000, that's about average. And so are the challenges facing its police force. Since 2001, the SCPD has laid off 10 of its 104 officers, even as the city's population grew by 5,500. The department now has to do more with less, which is the story of just about every police force in America. But this summer, the way the SCPD fights crime changed. It began a six-month experiment using large sets of data and a sophisticated algorithm to forecast when and where future crimes are most likely to take place-and how officers could be deployed preemptively to stop them. The approach is called predictive policing, and the experiment in Santa Cruz represents a...