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Bulletin: "Predictive policing": Saskatoon police claim to be establishing the first "Predictive Analytics Laboratory" in all of Canada - described by Global News as: "a pioneering program that will help police get out in front of crime before it happens."..."The lab is the first of it’s kind in country however there are similar strategies are already being used by police departments in the United States. Concerns regarding predictive policing so far in those jurisdictions are the potential for police to profile even damage the department’s rapport with the public." Globalnews.ca
"It’s a pioneering program that will help police get
out in front of crime before it happens. Thursday marked the official
launch of a Predictive Analytics Laboratory, the future in policing and
Saskatchewan is leading the country. The lab, a joint venture
between the provincial government, the University of Saskatchewan and
the Saskatoon Police. It is housed in a secure facility at the Saskatoon Police Service
(SPS) headquarters and essentially the lab will take complex data and
simplify it, finding patterns that could predict behaviours for police.“We
may see something that appears to be out of line, a pattern but it’s
really hard to explain,” said Deputy Chief Bernie Pannell, who is in
charge of administration at SPS. “If we’ve got some mathematical proof, some experts who are saying ‘this is definitely a pattern’, it’s really going to help us in doing what we do.” The
lab will begin by using SPS data but will be able to accommodate
information from other law enforcement agencies from throughout
Saskatchewan and eventually the country. Work on missing persons
and identifying common factors behind run-away behaviour will be the
first initiative to get underway at the lab......Children will be the
team’s first focus then adults but the powers of predictive analytic and
data mining don’t stop there. “One
could look at domestic violence, violence in general. Basically
anything that pertains to community safety so how do we move from just
reacting on the criminal side but also to do some interventions to
prevent serious crimes from happening,” said Brian Rector, executive
director, research and evidence-based excellence with the Ministry of
Justice. Sound familiar? Hollywood brought it to the big screen in 2002
with Minority Report
featuring Tom Cruise. The plot was set in Washington D.C. where for six
years that city had been murder free thanks to astounding technology
that identified killers before they committed their crime. While
preventing crime from happening, predator or prey is the overall goal of
the lab. Pannell says the fundamentals of policing aren’t about to
change. “Our powers of arrest are going to be exactly the same in the
future as what they are right now,” he said. “If there’s no grounds for
arrest the person won’t be arrested.” The
lab is the first of it’s kind in country however there are similar
strategies are already being used by police departments in the United
States. Concerns regarding predictive policing so far in those
jurisdictions are the potential for police to profile even damage the
department’s rapport with the public. “We would expect our
partners to behave in an ethical fashion with the results of our
research and applies to any sort of research.” said Stephen Wormith, director for the Centre for Forensic Behavioural Science and Justice Studies at the University of Saskatchewan. “At
the end of the day when we’re talking about prediction per-say about
criminal behavior, the benefits far outweigh the cost and risks in our
view.” Height and skin colour aren’t considered predictive
variables, experts say the most likely person to commit a crime is
someone who done so in the past."
