Program helps VPD predict property crimes
Posted July 22, 2017 8:43 am.
Last Updated July 22, 2017 9:54 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – It might sound like something out of Minority Report. The Vancouver Police Department has become the first force in Canada to adopt a new software tool to predict when and where property crimes will happen.
The adaptive software analyzes past break-ins to predict the general area and time future crimes may happen within a 100 metre and 500 metre radius and two-hour timeframe.
“Think of it as a weather forecast,” special const. Ryan Prox says. “Given the best information available, we can make our best assessment and we do have very high probabilities. Sometimes the probabilities are not as great on certain days depending on the variables.”
The full rollout of the software follows a six-month pilot between April and September last year. The pilot was launched in several neighbourhoods, mostly in Vancouver’s southern neighbourhoods, where more property crime occurs.
Police saw between a 21 and 27 per cent reduction in property crime over the first three months of the pilot, while the rest of the city continued to see an increase, according to VPD.
“The first quarter that we implemented this, in 2016 we had the highest number of residential break and enters on record,” Prox said. “By the second quarter of 2016, we hit the lowest number of residential break and enters on record.”
The program is part of the VPD’s five-year strategic plan to increase safety in the city. Despite a decrease in violent crimes, property crime has been on the rise in all of Metro Vancouver. Last year, Vancouver had 2,177 residential break-ins and 2,646 commercial break-ins.
VPD hopes the predictive program will disperse crime by increasing targeted patrols, according to Prox.
“We’re not targeting people, we’re targeting locations, so there’s nothing dark here,” Vancouver Police Chief Adam Palmer says.
However, it’s unlikely Vancouver will see predictions of crimes against people such as assault or murder any time soon, because humans and scenarios are just a little too hard to predict.
A public version of GEODASH was introduced in December 2015 and is publicly available at http://geodash.vpd.ca/.
