Cybercops: how algorithms help New York police spot crime patterns
- What used to be a labour-intensive and near impossible task – linking crimes across a major city – can now be done by clicking a button
When a syringe-wielding drill thief tried sticking up a Home Depot near Yankee Stadium, police quickly worked out it wasn’t a one-off. A man also used a syringe a few weeks earlier while stealing a drill at another Home Depot 11km (seven miles) south in Manhattan.
The match, though, wasn’t made by an officer looking through files. It was done by pattern-recognition computer software developed by the New York Police Department.
The software, called Patternizr, allows crime analysts stationed in the department’s 77 precincts to compare robberies, larcenies and thefts to hundreds of thousands of crimes logged in the NYPD’s database, transforming their hunt for crime patterns with the click of a button.
It’s much faster than the old method, which involved analysts sifting through reports, racking their brains for details about various crimes and deciding whether they fit into a pattern. It’s more comprehensive, too, with analysts able to spot patterns across the city instead of just in their precinct.
“Because Patternizr picked up those key details in the algorithm, it brought back complaints from other precincts that I wouldn’t have known,” said Bronx crime analyst Rebecca Shutt, who worked on the Home Depot case. “That was incredibly helpful. That could have been a pattern that wasn’t made.”