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Chicago goes high-tech in search of answers to gun crime surge
[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 2017-06-20 |
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