🔮 Predictive Policing: What It Is, and Why It Keeps Getting Banned

Predictive policing is the use of algorithms and historical data to forecast where crime is likely to occur or who is likely to be involved in it, so police can direct patrols or attention in advance. There are two broad kinds. Place-based systems, like the software once sold as PredPol, divide a city into small boxes — roughly 500 feet across — and predict which boxes will see crime on a given shift. Person-based systems, like Chicago's former Strategic Subject List, score individuals on their supposed likelihood of being involved in violence. Both borrow the language of objectivity and data science. Whether they deliver on it is the entire controversy, and the evidence is not kind.

The most rigorous public test suggests it barely does. In 2023 the nonprofit newsroom The Markup examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica — the company formerly called PredPol — for Plainfield, New Jersey in 2018. Fewer than 100 of those predictions lined up with a crime that was later reported in the predicted category and location. That is a success rate below half a percent. LAPD's own Inspector General separately found in 2019 that data problems made it difficult to draw conclusions about whether PredPol reduced crime, and the department dropped it in 2020. Some early pilots reported crime reductions, but these were not controlled studies, and the vendor wound down at the end of 2023, which tells its own story about how the product fared.

Because it learns from arrest data, and arrest data reflects where police have already been sent, not where crime actually happens. This is the core of the critique and it is a technical point, not just a political one. In an influential 2016 simulation, researchers Kristian Lum and William Isaac fed Oakland's police drug-crime records into a PredPol-style algorithm. They found it would have sent police to Black residents at about twice the rate of white residents. That was not because more drug use occurred there (survey estimates suggest it did not), but because that is where past enforcement was focused. The algorithm then sends officers back to those areas, producing more arrests, which feed back into the model as fresh confirmation. It is a feedback loop that launders historical bias as a neutral prediction. A 2021 analysis of 5.9 million real PredPol predictions by The Markup and Gizmodo found the most-targeted neighborhoods had fewer white residents and more Black and Latino residents.

The bans started where the technology was first piloted. Santa Cruz, California, which trialled PredPol in 2011, became the first US city to ban predictive policing in 2020. New Orleans also banned it but later rolled the protections back. Los Angeles and Chicago dropped their programs in 2019 and 2020, and in 2024 Florida's Pasco County Sheriff admitted in a settlement that his program was unconstitutional. The most sweeping action is in Europe: since 2 February 2025 the EU's AI Act has prohibited AI that predicts an individual's offending based solely on profiling or personality traits. That is an EU-wide prohibition on the person-based variety, though place-based forecasting is not covered. In the US there is no federal ban; the picture is a patchwork of individual departments quietly dropping contracts after the results and the lawsuits came in.

It rebranded and receded. PredPol grew out of an LAPD and UCLA collaboration around 2010, using a model originally built to forecast earthquake aftershocks and applying it to property crime. It became the most widely used predictive policing product in the country, used by dozens of departments. The Markup and Gizmodo found over 5.9 million predictions were sent to 38 agencies between 2018 and 2021, potentially touching more than one in 33 US residents. In 2021 the company renamed itself Geolitica. In 2023 SoundThinking, the firm previously known as ShotSpotter, hired its engineering team and acquired some of its intellectual property, and Geolitica said it would cease operations at the end of 2023. SoundThinking says it did not buy the crime-prediction technology itself. The name most associated with predictive policing effectively retired after the independent analyses landed.

They are different layers of the same surveillance stack, and they increasingly feed each other. Automated license plate readers record where specific vehicles go. Facial recognition identifies specific faces. Predictive policing is the analytical layer that sits on top — it does not collect a new kind of data so much as try to draw conclusions from data other systems collect, plus historical records. The concern with combining them is compounding: a predictive system that directs patrols to a neighborhood, whose ALPR cameras then log everyone who drives through, whose faces are then run against a watchlist, produces a self-reinforcing bubble of scrutiny around exactly the places the flawed model already pointed at. Each tool is questionable alone; together they are a machine for manufacturing suspicion.

Sometimes, with effort. Unlike ALPR cameras, predictive policing software leaves little physical trace, so the paper trail is procurement records and public-records requests rather than a map. The EFF's Atlas of Surveillance catalogues which US agencies have used which surveillance technologies, including predictive tools, and is the best starting point. Beyond that, city council budget documents, contract disclosures, and the work of local investigative reporters are where these programs surface. Our records-request tracker lists each state's response deadlines. Because vendors rebrand and departments rarely announce cancellations, current information is genuinely hard to pin down — a records request asking specifically which crime-forecasting or risk-assessment software a department has licensed, and when, is the most reliable route.

It is the comparison everyone reaches for, and it is both apt and misleading. Apt, because the premise — using prediction to act against crime before it happens — is exactly the same, and the film's unease about punishing people for forecasts rather than acts is precisely the civil-liberties objection. Misleading, because Minority Report imagines prediction that is essentially perfect, three psychics who are almost never wrong. Real predictive policing is the opposite: the documented problem is not that it works too well and traps the innocent through infallible foresight, but that it works barely at all, while lending a veneer of scientific certainty to patrol patterns that mostly reproduce where police already went. The dystopia is not omniscience. It is a coin-flip dressed as a crystal ball.

Yes, though rarely under that name. PredPol/Geolitica is gone, but vendors still sell software that tells police where to patrol. SoundThinking, for example, describes its ResourceRouter product as software that directs patrol and community anti-violence resources. In Europe, the AI Act has banned person-based prediction that rests solely on profiling since February 2025. In the UK, a Ministry of Justice research project that originally carried the name "Homicide Prediction Project" drew criticism in 2025; the ministry says it is research-only. Because the label has become toxic, look for words like "resource allocation", "risk assessment" or "intelligence-led" in procurement records.

Yes. In December 2024 the Pasco County, Florida, Sheriff's Office settled a federal lawsuit brought by the Institute for Justice on the eve of trial. The Sheriff admitted that his "intelligence-led policing" program, which identified residents expected to commit future crimes and subjected them and their families to repeated visits, violated the Fourth, First and Fourteenth Amendments. He ended the program, pledged never to restart it, and paid a six-figure sum to the plaintiffs.