I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it. It's challenging to measure the utility of

I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it. It's challenging to measure the utility of a system for predicting very low likelihood events, especially when the thing being measured is very heavily influenced by the method of measurement. For example, in Minority Report, the accuracy of the crime predictions is assumed to be perfect, and the result is that they are always incorrect. No crimes are committed because the intervention is always successful (at least up to the point where the story starts). So you might consider 'never have to make an arrest' to be a perfect record for such a system, as in minority report. You might equally logically take 'always makes an arrest' as proof a system like this is working. You also have to worry about crime moving around to avoid the police. Maybe the bank robbery was going to happen at BoA, but they drove by and saw a bunch of police and robbed the Wells Fargo 20 minutes away instead. As silly as it probably sounds, probably the best heuristic to get a good idea of whether a system like this works is the feedback police give after spending time following it's leads. If they say this thing is predicting where they need to be better than whatever they did before, and there isn't an obvious correlation to the predictions (as in, it doesn't always send them to the black neighborhood) then it probably warrants more careful analysis. In this case the police thought the system was crap.