Forecasting

TRANSPARENCY ADVOCATES WIN RELEASE OF NYPD “PREDICTIVE POLICING” DOCUMENTS

LATE LAST MONTH, a Manhattan judge ordered the New York City Police Department to release documentation about the department’s use of secretive and highly controversial “predictive policing” surveillance technology, scoring a win for advocates of transparency on police policy. The documents came to light as part of a lawsuit against the city filed by the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based policy institute.

Little is known about how the largest domestic police force in the United States uses crime-forecasting software, which works through analysis of historical crime data like arrest records, incident reports, gang documentation, and “stop and frisk” encounters to generate individual or geographic predictions of crime. In July 2015, then-NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton branded predictive policing as “the wave of the future” and entered into a trial program with at least one predictive policing company, the Philadelphia-based Azavea.