Fergie's Tech Blog

Reaping Results: Data-Mining Goes Mainstream

Steve Lohr writes in The New York Times:

Rodney Monroe, the police chief in Richmond, Va., describes himself as a lifelong cop whose expertise is in fighting street crime, not in software. His own Web browsing, he says, mostly involves checking golf scores.

But shortly after he became chief in 2005, a crime analyst who had retired from the force convinced him to try some clever software. The programs cull through information that the department already collects, like “911” and police reports, but add new streams of data — about neighborhood demographics and payday schedules, for example, or about weather, traffic patterns and sports events — to try to predict where crimes might occur.

“It sounded nutty at first,” Mr. Monroe recalled, “but the more and more you get into it, the more sense it makes.”

posted by Fergie @ 5/20/2007 10:49:00 AM