Have you ever seen the movie Minority Report? If you haven’t, all you need to know is that it’s about a special police unit that’s able to predict crimes, and is therefore able to arrest criminals before they actually commit those crimes. We don’t have anything close to the technology required to predict crimes, but theoretically, we can use big data to anticipate the probability of someone committing a crime or being a victim of crime, and have the police react accordingly. The Chicago Police Department tried to test out that theory back in 2013 and 2014, and the results are… not good.
