PredPol - The Predictive Policing Company Featured on CNN

July 15, 2012 - PRLog -- Faced with declining budgets and greater demands on service police departments are looking for tools that help deploy resources more effectively. As a recent feature story on CNN noted, one major resource emerging for law enforcement is predictive policing - spearheaded by a new California-based company called PredPol.

Zach Friend, a Crime Analyst with the Santa Cruz Police Department, one of the first agencies in the nation to deploy this program noted, “we’re facing a situation where we have 30 percent more calls for service but 20 percent less staff than in the year 2000, and that is going to continue to be our reality. So we have to deploy our resources in a more effective way. This model does that.”

So what exactly is predictive policing?

Predictive policing shifts how police resources are allocated; from the reactive to the proactive. As CNN reported, the program is called PredPol (short for predictive policing), and it calculates its forecasts based on times and locations of previous crimes, combined with sociological information about criminal behavior and patterns. The technology has been beta tested in the Santa Cruz, California police department for the past year, and in an L.A. police precinct for the past six months, with promising results.

In fact, Santa Cruz Police have seen a 19 percent reduction in burglaries since implementing the program while Los Angeles Police have seen 25 percent reduction.  LAPD estimates the implementation of the program has saved over $4 million in costs to the community.

More information about the company can be found at www.predpol.com