How To Catch a Criminal With 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.