Predictive policing is quite the buzz word these days. IBM (via SPSS) is one of the big players in the field. The most common use case is burglary, I suspect be

Predictive policing is quite the buzz word these days. IBM (via SPSS) is one of the big players in the field. The most common use case is burglary, I suspect because that's somewhat easy (and also directly actionable). You rarely find other use cases in academic papers (well I only browsed the literature a couple of times preparing for related projects). The basic idea is sending more police patrols to areas that are identified as high thread and thus using your available resources more efficiently. The focus in that area is more on objects/areas than on individuals so you don't try to predict who's a criminal but rather where they'll strike. It sounds like a good enough idea in theory but at least in Germany I know that research projects for predictive policing will be scaled down due to privacy concerns even if the prediction is only area and not person based (noteworthy that that's usually mentioned by the police as a reason why they won't participate in the research). I'm not completely sure and only talked to a couple of state police research people but quite often the data also involves social media in some way and that's the major problem from what I can tell.