Predict This!

Larry Yellin gets to the bottom of everything with hard hitting questions and a serious investigation:

• Yellen: Have you had an example in the last few months, since the predictive analytics group was put together, where you predicted a crime would occur in a particular neighborhood, and you were able to get there much quick than without the group? For example, where this person said, based on my data, we're going to have something within the next week in this neighborhood because it was busy at this time last year?

  Weis: That's hard to measure, because if we get there ahead of time, you are able to prevent it. When you talk to Brett [Goldstein, Director of Predictive Analytics], though, where he can cover you, is where he has anticipated some areas by a block, and like three hours afterward, there's been a shooting two hours away from where he actually thought there would be something.

Well that's a big fat "no" to a softball question. Yellen gives J-Fled and company a huge window of opportunity to demonstrate any tangible result, any definitive incident to justify the expenditure of how many hundreds of thousands of dollars in salary, software, programming along with god knows how many man-hours and they come up with zero? Hell, we predicted that exact outcome here months ago. How about paying us a Director's salary, giving us a corner office and a staff of dozens?

The fact is you cannot predict random events. Most crime is opportunistic and, yes, random. You might be able to spot trends or similar crimes over a period of time ranging from days to weeks to months, especially in the cases of serial killers, rapists and some robberies, but cops have been doing that without "predictive analytics" for decades now. Even then, it relies mostly on the criminal falling into habitual behavior (comfortable surroundings, repeated successes, available time to commit the crime and available victims to confront). These aren't "GATTACA" or "Minority Report" type scenarios full of genetic markers and "precogs" dealing with preordained outcomes.

And you have to love how Weis comes right out and says, "That's hard to measure, because if we get there ahead of time, you are able to prevent it." So let's get this straight....

• If we make an arrest, we must have been successful in being on scene;
• If we don't make an arrest, we must have been just as successful because we prevented a crime from occurring

Amazing. There is no downside for J-Fled or the Crystal Ball Unit. Does anyone else smell what this jackass is shoveling?