Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes A software company sold a New Jersey police department an algorithm that was right less than 1% of the time By Aaron Sankin<https://themarkup.org/people/aaron-sankin/> and Surya Mattu<https://themarkup.org/people/surya-mattu/> [...] We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percentage point. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police. Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent. [...] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-softwar... <https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-softwar...>