Data to reduce violence in cities


Posted on April 8, 2018  /  0 Comments

Our paper on bulk surveillance is under review and will be public soon. We did not go deep into predictive policing because most of the extant material was US-centric. It is interesting that the Economist, which keeps putting out city-level murder data, has chosen to publish a piece on the use of data in controlling violence in Latin America’s cities:

Rodrigo Guerrero, the city’s mayor and a surgeon by training, launched a plan inspired by the epidemiological approach some North American cities were taking at the time. He set up “violence observatories” where police, public-health officials, academics and concerned citizens could study crime data. This revealed that most of the city’s murders took place in drunken brawls, not in conflict between gangs, and that they were late at night a day or so after payday. Restricting alcohol sales and gun permits helped cut the homicide rate by 35% in a matter of months.

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