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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Chicago goes high-tech in search of answers to gun crime surge |
| 2017-06-20 |
| [BBC] In a cramped office in a police station in Chicago's 11th district, the sound of gunfire is a little computerised ping that rings out a few times a day. Somewhere in the district a microphone has picked up the percussive sound of a bullet and sent a signal, via California, to the station, which is where Kim Smith hears about it. Ms Smith, a data analyst from the University of Chicago, works at one of the city's new Strategic Decision Support Centres, where data, technology, and old-fashioned police work are being combined in an effort to control a sudden surge in gun violence. Seconds after a ping, a large flatscreen monitor displays a Google map of the gunshot location. Another connects to surveillance cameras activated by the shot, sometimes fast enough to see a gunman fleeing, and usually two or three minutes before the first 911 call comes in. The strategic centres were established in February after more than 4,000 shootings and 762 homicides in 2016 - a massive 59% increase on the previous year and more murders than New York and LA combined. President Trump threatened in January to "send in the Feds" if the city didn't fix "the horrible carnage". Taking blueprints from similar operations in LA and New York, Chicago PD set up two centres in the city's two most violent districts - Englewood and Harrison, which account for 5% of the city's population but nearly a third of all shootings last year. Eventually there will be six across the city, with initial set-up costs of about a million dollars each. Chicago PD borrowed civilian data analysts - including Ms Smith - from the University of Chicago in an attempt to make better use of existing technologies like the Shotspotter microphones and more sense of the crime data routinely collected by the department. The new cutting edge of anti-gun policing in Chicago had a modest start. The Englewood district centre set up shop in a disused line-up room, the partition wall and one-way glass knocked through to make more room. The first strategic meeting of the Harrison district centre was lit by a single lamp in a bare office. Now there are large flatscreen monitors fixed to the walls displaying live maps and charts, while analysts track data on two or three screens in front of them. Each morning there is a strategic meeting where officers and analysts pore over maps and reports, attempting to predict trends or identify trouble spots. Using a piece of predictive software called HunchLab, they translate the data into "missions", which can involve anything from talking to local business owners in certain areas to watching certain surveillance feeds at certain times. And they might be getting results. The two pilot districts - on the South and West sides - have seen a 30% and 39% drop in gun violence so far this year, against a 15% drop city-wide. Chicago Police Deputy Chief Jonathan Lewin, who oversaw the development of the centres, said it was still early days. "This is still a pilot so it's tough to determine causality," he said. "Is it the process, is it the technology, is it cars being more mobile because we're tracking them more rigorously? That's the million-dollar question." In reality, the stakes are higher than that. Chicago's murder rate soared last year, breaking 750 for the first time since the violent crime peak of the early 1990s and putting pressure on the police department to try new approaches. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
| #15 Maybe they shouldn't let gun criminals out early? Maybe they should charge offenders to the extent of the law? Maybe they should go after corruption in the city, county, and state government? |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2017-06-20 20:32 |
| #14 Doesn't require local politicians to get involved as much; it doesn't require state politicians at all This is Illinois, and Chicago specifically, so they will anyway Pappy. Gotta be some graft there somewhere. |
| Posted by: Mullah Richard 2017-06-20 15:05 |
| #13 Tech is relatively less expensive. This one is a low-budget project. Most of the work has already been done by somebody else. It isn't as labor intensive. And per the article (you did read the article, right?) it's at the Chicago PD level. Doesn't require local politicians to get involved as much; it doesn't require state politicians at all. |
| Posted by: Pappy 2017-06-20 14:58 |
| #12 So Illinois got tech instead of a budget? |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-06-20 13:54 |
| #11 This should allow the cops to get there while the dead guy is still warm. |
| Posted by: Bobby 2017-06-20 13:23 |
| #10 Crime surge is the Ferguson effect. Crime in Chicago is because of long standing liberal control of local government and the policies that go along with that. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2017-06-20 12:39 |
| #9 Did Obama go back to Chicago? |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2017-06-20 12:13 |
| #8 Gun crime surge is due to the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago Supreme Court decision, of course. /s |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2017-06-20 10:48 |
| #7 Wow, all that tech and money means that CPD will be less late in stopping a crime. The kaboom marks the clock on investigating yet another shooting in neighborhoods where nobody saw anything. Just throwing money at the edges of gang violence so they look like they are doing something. |
| Posted by: NoMoreBS 2017-06-20 10:27 |
| #6 You cannot apply a technical solution to a social problem. The problem is men with evil hearts. Until that problem is addressed, all the Strategic Decision Support Centres in the world won't help, even if you use the British spelling of center. |
| Posted by: Herb McCoy7309 2017-06-20 09:56 |
| #5 You have to be intelligent enough to ask the right question and ballsy enough not carry your pre-conceptions around. |
| Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 2017-06-20 09:56 |
| #4 Cause of the crime surge? Bad guys are bad. |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2017-06-20 08:46 |
| #3 I Know! Build mazes of 1" steel plate in all public right of ways so no one has a clean line of fire! That's the ticket! |
| Posted by: ed in texas 2017-06-20 08:33 |
| #2 Our scientists discovered that there is a formative pattern that surrounds the brain- kids educated in liberal kinder through - well... kinder care. (K-12-15-20) They spray the toilet with that poop stuff that makes it not smell and it surrounds their brain preventing anyone from smelling it. Then they drop YOUR Grand kids into the toilet and the scenty oil surrounds them and then give them a trophy for learning how to be dumber than when they appeared from the Womb. No one has to learn from anything at all, just follow the narrative. Now they are no different than a raspberry PI with a redundant software program on it. A Raspberry pi does not cost $67,000 to birth. Nor does one require that much to go through college a year and learn no more than a raspberry pi. |
| Posted by: newc 2017-06-20 03:24 |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2017-06-20 02:11 |