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Giovanni Mastrobuoni (Collegio Carlo Alberto)

30 April 2012

 

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Date:
30 April 2012
Event Category:

“Crime is Terribly Revealing: An Evaluation of Predictive Policing”

abstract

An increasing number of police departments around the world are trying to use predictive policing as a way to improve clearance rates at times of shrinking budgets. The police department of Milan has been working on a software that predicts future crime since 2008. This paper uses their detailed information on individual crimes coupled with offender-level identifiers to show that criminals’ follow habits, and that such habits make their future actions predictable. The contemporaneous existence of two almost identical police forces, one of which uses predictive police during the entire period while the other starts using it in 2010, allows me to evaluate predictive policing using a difference in difference approach. Predictive policing applied to robberies improves clearance rates by 11 to 12 percentage points, from 2 to 13. Assuming independent events the average number of events is predicted to be 26 for the control group and 7 for the treatment group.