Via Harvard Kennedy School – “This is the fifth in an article series based on Stephen Goldsmith’s paper “Digital Transformations: Wiring the Responsive City.” Click here to read the report in full.

“For decades, criminal-justice officials, advised by the results of good research, used data to drive performance. As a district attorney 30 years ago in Indiana, I used tools developed by the Department of Justice to identify “career criminals,” assigning them a score that would affect the severity of their charge and sentence. In retrospect, this was quite crude—prosecutors and police going through old paper-based criminal-history records, assigning numerical values to certain events, and ignoring other difficult-to-attain data sources. Now, in the wake of diminished finances but better technology resources, public safety officials increasingly rely on better targeted interventions, and they do more with less. According to a 2011 COPS office report, between layoffs and attrition, law enforcement departments reduced headcount by 40,000 (including reductions in more than half of America’s police departments) in the preceding year. In the face of mounting challenges, local officials turn to predictive analytics to enhance public safety efforts intelligently and judiciously. From policing and probation to disaster response and performance measurement, the capacity to track, model, and predict high-risk/high-need areas and constituencies has been an invaluable tool in public-sector management.”