Aug 21, 2015 12:16 AM
https://plus.maths.org/content/gangs-and-violence
EXCERPT: If you live in Los Angeles there are two things you might feel particularly worried about: earthquakes and crime. It's nice to know, then, that mathematics can help to keep you safe from both. A software system called PredPol, that has been developed by the mathematician George Mohler, the anthropologist Jeff Brantingham, and others, is now being rolled out across multiple jurisdictions of the Los Angeles Police Department and in other cities too. Officers on the ground use it every day.
PredPol stands for "predictive policing". It works by calculating the probability that crimes will be committed in a particular area on a particular day, based on real-time data from the previous couple of days. Police officers are then given prediction maps telling them where the probability is high, so they can put in place extra patrols and hopefully prevent at least some of those crimes from happening.
So how do you go about understanding crime mathematically? One approach is to look at the situation "bottom-up": simulate the behaviour of individual criminals using mathematical rules and see what kind of patterns emerge (see this article to find out more). But you can also use more of a "top-down" approach: forget about individuals and look at crimes as statistical occurrences, like earthquakes, that exhibit some regularities. PredPol makes use of the latter approach....
EXCERPT: If you live in Los Angeles there are two things you might feel particularly worried about: earthquakes and crime. It's nice to know, then, that mathematics can help to keep you safe from both. A software system called PredPol, that has been developed by the mathematician George Mohler, the anthropologist Jeff Brantingham, and others, is now being rolled out across multiple jurisdictions of the Los Angeles Police Department and in other cities too. Officers on the ground use it every day.
PredPol stands for "predictive policing". It works by calculating the probability that crimes will be committed in a particular area on a particular day, based on real-time data from the previous couple of days. Police officers are then given prediction maps telling them where the probability is high, so they can put in place extra patrols and hopefully prevent at least some of those crimes from happening.
So how do you go about understanding crime mathematically? One approach is to look at the situation "bottom-up": simulate the behaviour of individual criminals using mathematical rules and see what kind of patterns emerge (see this article to find out more). But you can also use more of a "top-down" approach: forget about individuals and look at crimes as statistical occurrences, like earthquakes, that exhibit some regularities. PredPol makes use of the latter approach....