Crime forecasts generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, they are rarely combined with the reported crimes, according an analysis of The Markup. The specific analysis adds a new context to the debate about the effectiveness of crime prediction software.
Geolitica, also known as PredPol until 2021 when it changed its brandname, produces software that absorbs data from crime reports and produces daily predictions of where and when crimes are likely to occur.
“We reviewed 23.631 predictions generated by Geolitica between February 25 and December 18, 2018, for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Every prediction we analyzed from our company's algorithm indicated that a type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. Ultimately, the success rate was less than half a percent (0,5%).”
“Fewer than 100 predictions corresponded to a crime in the predicted category that was reported to the police at some point. Looking deeper, we focused on predictions specific to robberies or serious assaults likely to occur in Plainfield and found an equally low success rate: 0,6 percent.
The motif it was even worse when we looked at break-in predictions, which had a 0,1% success rate.”
