What predictive policing software does, and what audits found

Predictive policing software is a family of tools that sift past crime records to spot where crime tends to cluster, or who may be involved. Commanders use the output to place patrols ahead of events. The systems forecast patterns; they decide nothing about a person’s conduct. Scale is what separates these tools from the paper crime maps departments kept for decades. Modern systems score city blocks, and sometimes people, from years of reports. Named independent reviews now ask two questions: do the forecasts work, and do they steer enforcement onto some neighborhoods more than others? How does predictive policing software work? The inputs are ordinary records: dates, places, and offense types from past incidents. The software hunts for clusters and repeats, then prints forecasts, usually as grids or lists ranked by risk. A department turns that output into a patrol plan, which typically sends officers to the estimated time and place of a crime.

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