Predictive Policing
Trena Mainor
Strayer University
Dr. Richard Brown
July 15, 2014

Predictive Policing
In the current economic climate, police departments are being asked to do more with less. In some localities, significant budget reductions require police and command staff to consider reductions in the retention of sworn personnel. Personnel costs represent the single largest budget line item in most public safety organizations. The ability to use this resource more efficiently has become essential to police managers under current budgetary restrictions. Now, new tools designed to increase the effective use of police resources could make agencies more efficient, regardless of the availability of resources. As these new budgetary restraints and limitations arise, the question to ask with more urgency is: “Why just count crime when you can anticipate, prevent, and respond more effectively?” Predictive policing allows command staff and police managers to leverage advanced analytics in support of meaningful, information-based tactics, strategy, and policy decisions in the applied public safety environment. As the law enforcement community increasingly is asked to do more with less, predictive policing represents an opportunity to prevent crime and respond more effectively, while optimizing increasingly scarce or limited resources, including personnel. (Beck & McCue, 2013).
About seven years ago, researchers from the University of Memphis came up with the idea that detects crime patterns in local geographic hot spots throughout the city. If one is to gain access to the department’s crime data; the police departments have access to large volumes of useful materials from which data, including, arrest warrants, crime-scene reports, traffic citations, mug shots, dispatch transcripts and incident times. But this data is traditionally too painstaking