Harnessing Analytics to Combat Crime: Predictive Analytics Helps Memphis Police Department Pinpoint Crime and Focus Police Resources
When Larry Godwin took over as director of the Memphis Police Department (MPD) in 2004, crime across the metro area was surging, and city leaders were growing impatient. “The mayor told me I want this crime problem fixed,” recalls Godwin, a 38-year veteran of the MPD. But the new director understood that a business-as-usual approach to crime fighting would no longer be good enough. Early on in his tenure, Godwin convened a meeting of top law enforcement experts to formulate a fresh strategy to turn the tide in the city’s crime war. Among the participants in this mini-summit was Dr. Richard Janikowski, a professor of criminology at the University of Memphis, who specialized in using predictive analytics to better understand patterns.
Fighting Crime with Analytics
Janikowski proposed the idea of mining MPD’s crime data banks to help zero in on where and when criminals were hitting hardest and then “focus police resources intelligently by putting them in the right place, on the right day, at the right time.” By doing so, he said, “you’ll either deter criminal activity or you’re going to catch people.” The idea made sense to Godwin and in short order the MPD and the University of Memphis—along with Project Safe Neighborhoods—teamed up in a pilot program that later became known as Operation Blue CRUSH, or Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History.
The data-driven pilot was wildly successful. During one 2-hour operation, officers arrested more criminals than they normally apprehended over an entire weekend. But for Blue CRUSH to be successful on a citywide scale, the MPD would need to align its resources and operations to take full advantage of the power of predictive analytics. If done right, a citywide rollout of Blue CRUSH had the potential to save money through efficient deployments—a big plus in a city facing serious budget pressures—even as the intelligence-based approach would help drive down overall crime rates. Shortly after, all precincts embraced Blue CRUSH, and predictive analytics has become one of the most potent weapons in MPD’s crime-fighting arsenal. At the heart of the system is a versatile statistical analysis tool—IBM SPSS Modeler— that enables officers to unlock the intelligence hidden in the department’s huge digital library of crime records and police reports going back nearly a decade.
Safer Streets
All indications are that Blue CRUSH and its intelligence-driven crime-fighting techniques are putting a serious dent in Memphis-area crime. Since the program was launched, the number of Part One crimes—a category of serious offenses including homicide, rape, aggravated assault, auto theft, and larceny—has plummeted, dropping 27 percent from