Oi, London thief. We KNOW what you're doing - our PRECRIME system warned us Italian boffins claim to have devised a method of predicting future crime trends in London using creepy footfall data collected by a mobile phone provider. A team at the University of Trento said they are able to work out whether an area will have a low or high crime rate with an accuracy of 70 per cent. The researchers' …
Precrime should tell me that I'll get mugged if I walk down that particular street right now, not just be a slightly higher resolution crime incidence map.
Maybe they've got some interesting observations about where people go when & how this correlates to types of crime, but it's drowned out by this disappointing precrime angle?
Looking at the map, most of the red zones are around central London tube stations most used by tourists and targeted by pickpockets. Was it really that much effort to work out crime will happen in such obvious areas?
They should have used a normal town as an example, it would be much more representative. It is pretty much guaranteed that crime is going to happen around Oxford Circus tomorrow afternoon, it is a pickpocket's paradise
Drug dealing / Shooting - sink-hole estates
Pick pocketing / bag snatching - tourist areas and tube stations.
Drunken violence - city centres and nr pubs, peaking on Friday and Saturday nights,
Under-age drinking, nr parks, co-ops & bargain booze
Football violence, pubs near football grounds, mainly Saturday and Sunday afternnons.
I make that a lot more accurate than 70%
Did the Ministry of the Bleedin' Obvious sponsor this study?
Go to any town and ask a local where you're likely to get mugged, get your car broken into or get pick pocketed and I bet they'll be able to tell you with greater than 70% accuracy (they may even be the one to do one of the above!)
that lives within walking distance of the team he/she supports. Well, at least for most of the Permier League this is true. I walk to my teams (conference) ground in around 10 mins.
Will the group of Ipswich fans who travel from Norway a few times a season spark a crimewave?
Will all the Man U fans from Brighton lay waste to the Regeny Palace when the get beaten or non of their expensive signings fail to score?
These are in my mind more important questions.
As a hardened criminal, or at least one who likes to be on the ball, I would be delighted to subscribe to the service (ideally an app) that shows me where my competition (and plods) are most likely to appear in large numbers. Bring in real life, dynamic results, please!
I sure wouldn't mind knowing that crime will happen in my street next month, but I'd like it a bit more specific: Pickpocketing and burglary would be high on my list of concern, while domestic violence would be somewhat lower (because I'd know in advance if I was in a risk group for that). Maybe those Italians could refine their research into varioius crime categories. Then again, I'd very much like to be assured they don't get funding from a certain well-known Italian organisation...
Wait...what? How do they get that information? Tracking where a mobile phone is one thing, but that level of data scraping is making a lot of assumptions about who is actually carrying it. Even the telco doesn't know who is carrying the phone or even if the actual user is the same person who bought or registered it.
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Joke Alert= the city maps were online... the boxes are areas to have a police presense, suggests limited coverage in the non-boxed areas...the police are convinced they are 'supressing crime'...per the TV show, NOT EVERYONE is convinced this is a good idea.
IMHO= this is really a map of where the Police Aren't... pricess to criminals w/ computer access...RS.
Back in the early 90s I worked for an NHS Ambulance Service which was approached by researchers at one of the local Universities.
They had this great idea for a piece of software they wanted to trial, which would predict the likelehood of an emergency call in any particular area the service covered, based on historical data from the last ten years or so.
The idea was that the service could position it's vehicles close to the predicted scene of an incident, and therefore cut down on response times.
Unsurprisingly, it didn't work, as real life doesn't work like that, but the statisticians were convinced their methodology was sound... In more cases than a little, the vehicles were at the wrong end of the county when the next emergency came in.
Those of us working at the sharp end could have told them it wouldn't work, but the Trust spent thousands on the system before they eventually gave it up as a bad job.
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