Police warm to predictive analysis crime fighting tools

University of Maryland criminology professor.

Hedy M. Weinberg, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, said an “integrative approach” to placing police where they’re needed is a good idea and that a stronger relationship between the community and police often creates safer streets.

“That said, there is always the potential for abuse when it is assumed that race, ethnicity or economic status are indicators of criminal activity,” Weinberg said. “That is not acceptable policing.” Weinberg said she was a bit skeptical of claims that Blue CRUSH is behind the crime rate reduction.

“There are so many things that go into crime rates. There are a number of factors that affect both the increase and decrease in crime,” she said.

Memphis lawyer and ACLU board member Bruce S. Kramer told Sullivan he is concerned with the surveillance aspect of the effort, particularly with cameras. “Are they reacting to crime, or are they monitoring based on demographics and profiling? One’s OK; one’s not.”

Richard Janikowski of the University of Memphis Center for Community Criminology and Research helped bring Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and predictive analytics together. Janikowski had long used SPSS as a research tool but has no financial relationship with the company.

“We all know crime is not equally distributed in any area,” Janikowski said. “We know poor, minority communities are where crime tends to be concentrated for a whole slew of historical reasons, which means the majority of victims of crimes in the country are poor and minority.

“I think sometimes civil libertarians — and I would classify myself as one; I teach constitutional law — forget about the victims. I’m all in favor of … getting community members involved, doing re-entry support, all those things that can make long-term changes in a community, and I think they’re important. What I’m unwilling to do is simply write off the current victims and just say, ‘Too bad. You’re just going to have to run the significantly higher risk of becoming a victim of crime.’ I think that’s wrong. That’s a civil liberties issue, too.”

Janikowski said the technology is only one element in a “multidimensional, overall strategy adopted by MPD” that includes new police tactics, refocusing police units, creating new units, community mobilization and outreach efforts.

“The much larger piece was organizational change and cultural change within the department,” Janikowski said.

The U of M received a $2.4 million congressional earmark in 2008 to work on the Blue CRUSH project.

MPD Col. Jim E. Harvey, the department’s technology expert, underlined the sense that Blue CRUSH is as much philosophical as technological. “If you’re not actively looking at these reports that we get generated, then it’s not going to do you any good,” he said. “That’s where I guess we excel.”

Chicago announced last month that it is working with the Rand Corp. on an analytics initiative. San Jose, California, Jackson, Tennessee, and others are working with software called Command Central from the company CrimeReports. Asked how essential it is to use proprietary software, with its attendant fees, to do the analytics, Harvey said the software is critical.

“If we just ran reports, it would show us, sure enough, that we had crimes happening, but it’s harder to show that over a year’s period of time, or even over a seven-day period, what time of day and what day of the week that the crimes are happening,” Harvey said. “That’s what SPSS does for us.”

How valuable is knowing when and where crimes occurred in the past? “We’re able to put our resources where they need to be,” said Harvey, repeating the foregone-conclusion rationale. “If we didn’t have that, we’d just be pretty much taking a shot in the dark.”

Harvey noted that all police officers fill out incident reports on handheld devices that make them available to detectives and others within minutes, rather than days. All suspects — and even victims and witnesses — are automatically run through the National Crime Information Center database and checked for local and national outstanding warrants, he said.

Sullivan writes that other departments like New York City and Baltimore — and Memphis, too — have experimented with so-called CompStat (Computer Statistics) accountability measures in the past. Williams, though, who studied the New York model, says Blue CRUSH is more than the typical monthly meeting where a precinct commander gets grilled.

The reports generated at 3 a.m. on Mondays are constantly updated, and Thursday morning meetings to go over progress with PowerPoint presentations are attended by all precinct commanders plus Godwin and other top brass. Every focus area in each of the nine precincts gets attention.

“Since the inception of Blue CRUSH, it has been more successful than any saturation or zero-tolerance operation in the history of the Memphis Police Department,” Williams said.