"It is really important that we learn how to blend the two. If it becomes all about the science, I worry we'll lose the important nuances," he said.
It remains to be seen whether work like Mohler's and Short's can translate into helping cops make day-to-day decisions. The science has progressed only so far.
Much of the work at UCLA and other universities focuses on burglaries, because there are a lot of them and their times and locations are easy to pin down. Building predictive tools capable of addressing rarer and more complex crimes, such as homicides and rapes, will be far more complex.
Malinowski knows as well that the LAPD will have to overcome significant obstacles. Perhaps most pressing is the need to dramatically upgrade the department's technology infrastructure and improve the way it collects crime data.
And there is a public relations battle that must be won. Malinowski is trying to preempt the likely concerns of civil rights advocates who worry that predictive policing could be used to profile and harass individuals before they do anything wrong. He is quick to say that the technology will not turn the city into a real-life version of "Minority Report," a 2002 science fiction film in which cops arrest people for crimes they are about to commit.
"This will be the opposite of a dragnet, where we just go out and pick up everybody because they're on a certain street corner at the wrong time. We'll be basing our decision on facts. It will be dispassionate," he said. "We still have a Constitution, and we're still going to be arresting people based on probable cause, not on the probability that they'll commit a crime."
joel.rubin@latimes.com
