Law enforcement work is frequently reactive: Officers respond to calls for service, control disturbances and make arrests. But law enforcement work is becoming increasingly proactive: Departments combine data with street intelligence and crime analysis to understand why a problem arises and predict what might happen next if they take certain actions.
NIJ is supporting predictive policing efforts in a number of ways:
- Predictive policing symposiums. NIJ convened two symposiums at which researchers, practitioners and law enforcement leaders developed and discussed the concept of predictive policing and its impact on crime and justice. Read summaries of both sessions.
- Predictive policing grants. The Chicago and Shreveport police departments are using grants to explore data-driven policing strategies. In Phase 1, they received funding to identify a problem and develop predictive policing strategies to solve it. In Phase 2, they were awarded additional funding to implement and evaluate the strategies.
For More Information
- To learn more about predictive policing in general, read the NIJ Journal article "Predictive Policing: The Future of Law Enforcement?"
About This Article
This article appeared in NIJ Journal Issue 271, February 2013, as a sidebar to the article The Pitfalls of Prediction by Greg Ridgeway.