A team of UCLA researchers has once again delved into the world of crime fighting, this time developing a computer program capable of pointing police in the right direction when rivalries between street gangs erupts into violence and crime.
The university announced Monday that mathematicians have devised a complex algorithm that crunched information from the Los Angeles Police Department on more than 1,000 gang-related crimes and suspected gang crimes in the LAPD’s Hollenbeck Division -- an area of East L.A. that is home to more than two dozen active gangs.
The goal was to bring some mathematical order to the murky, shifting gang landscape in Hollenbeck, where rivalries and alliances between groups are difficult to track.
By sifting through a decade of crime data and searching for otherwise undetectable patterns, the algorithm was designed to identify which gangs were most likely involved in crimes.
To test it, the researchers created an imaginary set of crime data that closely mirrored the actual shootings, assaults and other crimes in the Hollenbeck Division. They then removed pieces of important information — either the name of the victim, the perpetrator or both — and tested whether the computer algorithm could come up with the missing data.
About 80% of the time, the high-powered calculations were able to identify the three gangs that were most likely to have committed a crime against a rival.
"That narrows it down quite a bit,” said Martin Short, co-author of the study, in an announcement released by UCLA. It is, he said, “significantly better than chance.”
No comments:
Post a Comment