Which Came First?

LAPD is up and running with the "Predictive Policing" thingie. Jack Dunphy writes:

• Has the future of police work arrived? You might think so if you had read an article that appeared in the August 21 edition of the Los Angeles Times. Running under the headline “Stopping crime before it starts,” the article described recent advances in what is known as “predictive policing,” in which complex mathematical formulas are used to forecast when and where crimes are likely to occur.

• All of which sounds fine until you realize that a cop who spends too much of his work day staring into a computer screen will spend too little of it looking out the window of his police car for the criminals he has been so sophisticatedly equipped to detect. When I was a rookie cop in the early ‘80s, each day in roll call I was handed a copy of what was called the Daily Occurrence report, known to street cops of the time as the D.O. sheet. Most of the veteran cops I worked with gave it a glance and took note of particulars like vehicle descriptions and license numbers of cars used in crimes, but they had little use for it otherwise. They already knew where the area’s crimes were most likely to occur from having handled the calls themselves and from talking with their colleagues. They also knew where the parolees lived, which, then as now, was most often not where their parole records indicated. More important, they knew when to jump out of the car and put the grab on somebody they could see was up to no good.

Go read the entire article. He mentions a bunch of recent happenings here in Chicago, too.