Police Data-Mining Done Right

enharmonix writes "Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it's nice to hear something good about data mining for a change: predicting and stopping crime. For example, police in Redmond, VA, 'started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.'"

Wrong city listed in summary

[chiph]

The city that won the business intelligence award for data mining is Richmond VA, not 'Redmond'.

Chip H.

Re:scanning the comments here on slashdot

[CaffeineAddict2001]

People go to the police because they are the only ones in our society who are given the right to use force and spy on people, not because we think they are the most qualified for helping us with our problems.

God..

[msimm]

Where do you people come from? Humanity sucks? People with your shit attitude suck. I scanned the comments, they where a typical mix. I don't love or hate police. I don't like it when they abuse their power (power has that problem) but I know there are plenty of people out there working in law enforcement that do what they do because they care about it. Same as with a lot of other things, but like doctors, paramedics, firefighters and countless other occupations what they do often helps save lives.

Maybe if you could do more then reflexively see the negative part of 'humanity' you could have posted something worth the +5 insightful. All I hear is adolescent clap-trap. Grow up.

I think you'll find

[Sycraft-fu]

Many departments don't have quotas on tickets. They by and large don't need to. People violate traffic laws (speeding especially) ALL the time. So all you have to do is get cops that like to write tickets (bastards basically) and set them to work in areas that are a problem. You get loads of tickets.

That's how it works here. You'll essentially never get a ticket for doing less than 10 over (except special cases like school zones and such) and there's no quotas at all. They just put the jerks, the people who will write other cops and even the own family tickets (really) on ticket duty. They have no problem issuing a book or more a day each.

There's not really much reason to whine, either. Yes, the ticket cops are jerks, but if you are going 10 over you can't really say you didn't know.