I was recently interviewed for a webcast by the Canadian Society of Evidence Based Policing on Predictive Policing.

I am not directly affiliated with any software vendor, so these are my opinions as an outsider, academic, and regular consultant for police departments on quantitative problems.

I do have some academic work on predictive policing applications that folks can peruse at the moment (listed below). The first is on evaluating the accuracy of a people predictions, the second is for addressing the problem of disproportionate minority contact in spatial predictive systems.

• Wheeler, Andrew P., Robert E. Worden, and Jasmine R. Silver. (2018) The predictive accuracy of the Violent Offender Identification Directive (VOID) tool. Conditionally accepted at Criminal Justice and Behavior. Pre-print available here.
• Wheeler, Andrew P. (2018) Allocating police resources while limiting racial inequality. Pre-print available here.

I have some more work on predictive policing applications in the pipeline, so just follow the blog or follow me on Twitter for updates about future work.

If police departments are interested in predictive policing applications and would like to ask me some questions, always feel free to get in contact. (My personal email is listed on my CV, my academic email is just Andrew.Wheeler at utdallas.edu.)

Most of my work consulting with police departments is ad-hoc (and much of it is pro bono), so if you think I can be of help always feel free to get in touch. Either for developing predictive applications or evaluating whether they are effective at achieving the outcomes you are interested in.