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16 - Critic

Predictive Policing: Where’s the Evidence?

from Part VIII - Predictive Policing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2019

By
Rachel Boba Santos
Edited by
David Weisburd  and
Anthony A. Braga
David Weisburd
Affiliation:
George Mason University, Virginia
Anthony A. Braga
Affiliation:
Northeastern University, Boston
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Summary

Crime analysis is a field of study and practice in criminal justice that utilizes various data sources and analytical techniques to support crime prevention, crime reduction, and criminal apprehension efforts of police agencies (International Association of Crime Analysts [IACA], 2014). Crime mapping is a subset of crime analysis that focuses on understanding the geographic nature of crime and other activity and presents results to a wide range of police audiences through published maps (Santos, 2017). Although there have been crime analysts in police departments since the early 1970s (Austin et al., 1973) and researchers who have analyzed crime for centuries (Weisburd & McEwen, 1997), there has been a notable increase in the last twenty years of police agencies implementing crime analysis, purchasing analytical technology and software, and hiring in-house qualified individuals to conduct analysis – crime analysts.

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Type
Chapter
Information
Police Innovation
Contrasting Perspectives
 , pp. 366 - 396
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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