Memphis Cracks Crime Trends With Forecasting Technology

Six years ago, the Memphis, Tenn., Police Department (MPD) decided to use technology to look into the future. With the local crime rate soaring, software that could forecast where criminal activity would take place seemed like a promising idea, packed with potential. But crime analysts never predicted such explosive results. Since 2006, with IBM predictive analytics technology, the MPD has reduced crime by 31 percent, including a reduction of 15.4 percent in violent crime, according to MPD officials.

In the days before the technology, the MPD -- like most police departments -- relied on human abilities to put offenses in spreadsheets and analyze trends the old-fashioned way, said John F. Williams, crime analysis unit manager with the MPD. In Memphis, those days are history. "By putting the crime data on the map, we could concentrate on focus areas," Williams said. "The software spits out frequencies and cross tabs. We could see the base, the time of day, day of the week and the types of crimes, and we were able to deploy resources at the exact time the crimes were occurring. It blew our minds how accurate things were."

With predictive analytics, the MPD can evaluate incident patterns throughout the city and forecast criminal hot spots. The data allows the department to allocate resources to target areas and develop deployment strategies, including directed patrol, targeted traffic enforcement, task forces, operations, high-visibility patrol and targeted investigations.

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Predictive Analysis and Death From Above

The way predictive analysis works is quite simple. With more data (from the vidcams, electronic eavesdropping and informants on the ground) it's possible to create a model (or simulation) of what terrorist activity on the ground looks like. Thus, if the CIA analysts see certain patterns of actions on the ground, they can accurately predict where the Islamic terrorists are, what they doing and, often, exactly who (like a key Taliban or al Qaeda operative) is down there. At that point, the Hellfire missiles are applied. The track record of the accuracy of these predictions has been striking. Few civilians have been attacked, nearly all the targets have been, as the predictive analysis indicated, terrorists.

A key factor in making all this work was the U.S. government changing its policy, in the last two years, of only attacking terrorists on a list (of up to 500) of named individuals. Predictive analysis cannot always guarantee that a target will be a specific individual, but it can, with near certainty, indicate that the target is an Islamic terrorist. It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century.

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