There was a recent discussion over at the IACA mailing list that kicked around the topic of predictive policing. One of the posts that started it included an article from The Atlantic Cities that discussed Memphis Police and their effort at real time data mining of crime data.
About seven years ago, researchers from the University of Memphis approached the city’s police department with the idea that they might be able to detect patterns in local crime – geographic hot spots on the city’s map and moments in time when they’re most likely to flare up – if they could just have access to the department’s crime data. Police departments produce reams of this stuff: arrest warrants, crime-scene reports, traffic citations, mug shots, dispatch transcripts and incident times. But that data has traditionally been painstaking to cross-reference, to mine for connections and even future trends.
The researchers ultimately turned the department onto an analytic software called SPSS, which had for years been used to crunch data in a host of disciplines not necessarily connected to crime. The department launched a pilot program with it to analyze trends, as part of a strategy of fighting crime by real-time data-mining.
I have been quite intrigued with being able to mine the crime data at my agency for meaningful information. We really do warehouse vast amounts of data. The tools to mine the data are getting more accessible all the time. Even your trusty Microsoft Excel is capable of some very sophisticated analysis.
Today I was working on a project to analyze over a half million Calls for Service records with Excel. I have also been experimenting with using the open source statistical software R, and a data mining GUI interface for it called Rattle.
I think that the future of crime analysis lies with technologies like data mining and predictive policing. Thankfully, there are lots of folks out there working on this very thing. What are you doing to become a data miner?
A tip of the hat to crime analyst Tom Scholten for posting the Atlantic Cities story.
