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From the Collection of Police Officer Ed Fidler

A story, just published by Technical.ly Philly, reports that the Philadelphia Police Department has received a new one-year grant – totaling $320,000 – from the Bureau of Justice Assistance to help them focus on “hypothesis testing”.

For those who may not know – I know I sure didn’t – hypothesis testing is a process in which police officers identify a specific crime that keeps happening in a particular area during a particular time, work with community members to come up with answers, or hypotheses, as to why this crime keeps getting committed and then tests those hypotheses. Technical.ly Philly notes that according to Police Department Deputy Commissioner Nola Joyce, this is a new practice that has its roots at the University College of London.

While some of the department’s officers trained as crime analysts have already been doing some of this work, this specific project will focus on testing the effectiveness of the technique on a few districts.

This scientific approach will prevent a situation where “whoever makes the strongest argument or who has the loudest voice or perhaps the highest rank is the opinion that wins the day,” Joyce told Technical.ly Philly.

Previously, a police district might build a whole strategy around what is essentially a guess as to why a certain crime is happening.

“If it’s not true, we’re wasting a whole lot of resources,” Joyce said.

The Police Department will work with Temple University and criminal justice professor Jerry Ratcliffe, who partnered with the department on previous federally-funded data science projects. Ratcliffe and his staff will train the department’s crime analysts in hypothesis testing.

Original story posted by Technical.ly Philly on 11/17/2014

 

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