[HunchLab] Predicting Crime in Miami

Shelley shelley at misanthropia.org
Wed Jun 24 10:17:20 PDT 2015


Looks like it was developed with an $800,000 federal grant and someone from 
the Philadelphia police dept:

http://technical.ly/philly/2013/11/07/azavea-philly-police-crime-prediction-software/

Interesting article (sorry for no excerpt, I'm currently mobile.)  They 
even use the weather as a variable?

Main site: hunchlab.com

Still have to look up Azavea and see who's behind them/ how much money they 
suck from the fed teat.


----------
On June 24, 2015 9:42:54 AM Tim Beelen <tim at diffalt.com> wrote:

> This is how it's pitched to the community:
> > 
> http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article19256145.html
>
> 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.
> > http://cj.fiu.edu/people/faculty/rob-guerette/
>
> 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?





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