This is how it's pitched to the community:
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article19256145.h...
FTA: The Miami police currently is using COMPSTAT, which does not predict where crime will happen insofar it tells you where it has been taking place. In addition they will start using HunchLab at some point. An associate professor from Florida International University, Rob T. Guerette is expected to become their local expert on this piece of software. The person who wrote the grant for it is Lt. Sean MacDonald.
The article claims that similar software has "... helped prevent and stop property crimes, and is now being tested on gun crimes." Which makes me curious as about the kind of heuristics that they are using. HunchLab apparently produces maps showing small areas where specific crimes are likely to be committed. This is not a new turn of events, as Miami-Dade’s robbery division uses IBM's Blue PALMS to solve cold cases. The software connects to a database of every crime ever documented by Miami-Dade police. Detectives enter the details of an unsolved crime and the program produces a list of 20 suspects. Now the part of the Nuevo Herald's article that cough my attention is the moment that it starts speculating about it's effectiveness. The last few sentences juxtapose the potential volatility of it's predictions with who is responsible for it's "effectiveness". HunchLab uses a wider dataset than the rough equivalent PredPol. Annotated with the official final statement that the tool will only be "...as good as the officers using it." Putting the burden of proof of it's effectiveness squarely on the shoulders of the officers forced to use it. Which is, in my opinion, ridiculous. Since the software is supposed to predict the crime and not the other way around. I highly suspect that it grabs a bunch of data, normalizes it for the use with a map and starts looking for some correlation coefficient and then looks if it's statistically significant. I.e. it's a null hypothesis-- exactly what Larry Samuels, CEO of PredPol tries to warn them about expecting weird results. Since that is exactly what you get when you grow your dataset and statistically analyze the date using correlation coefficients + phi. Anyway. Who build this software? And what does it do?