https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2012/02/22/predicting-crime-before-it-occurs/feed/HotAir is the leading conservative blog for breaking news and commentary covering the Biden administration, politics, media, culture, and current elections.en-usThu, 11 Jun 2026 21:30:31 -0400<![CDATA[But against the backdrop of statewide calls for reform, Berk was already quietly working on a fix: an algorithm that could spit out a prediction of how likely it is that a would-be parolee will re-offend. Berk had begun building a similar algorithm for Philadelphia’s criminal-justice system in 2006, the year Philadelphia logged the highest murder rate among major cities. At the time, Philadelphia’s Adult Probation and Parole Department had 295 officers supervising nearly 50,000 individuals. The department asked Berk to predict which of the 50,000 would commit a serious crime within two years. “Our vision was that every single person, when they walked through the door, would be scored by a computer,” says Ellen Kurtz, the department’s director of research. The department would then use the score—low-, medium-, or high-risk—to decide how intensively to supervise released offenders. Officers assigned to low-risk individuals would handle up to 400 cases, and those monitoring high-risk offenders would have about 50.]]>Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:00:23 -0500<![CDATA[Tina Korbe]]>https://hotair.com/headlines/2012/02/22/predicting-crime-before-it-occurs-n90288