Nearly a decade ago, researchers at the Rutgers University School of Criminal Justice invented a new tool to help predict crime. Instead of focusing on how likely people are to break the law, which can lead to discriminatory profiling, Joel Caplan and Leslie Kennedy analyzed environmental factors that might lead to crime.
They worked them into a “risk terrain modeling” system that combines the factors to produce a map of where illegal activities are most likely to occur. For example, an alleyway with few escape routes for victims and poor lighting that hides a perpetrator combine to increase risk.
In the fall of 2015, Atlantic City police and the county prosecutor partnered with the researchers to test the tool for the first time and start training officers in its use. The same year, the Rutgers Center on Public Security began a study for the federal National Institute of Justice to validate and evaluate risk terrain modeling across multiple jurisdictions and different types of crimes. Newark is among six police agencies nationwide collaborating in the study.
The researchers and Atlantic City built upon their initial tests with a one-year pilot risk terrain program for 2016 to gauge the system’s crime predictive ability and integrate it with the police department’s new computer systems.
That set up full implementation of risk-based policing at the start of last year. For the first five months, Rutgers staff worked closely with department leaders and helped develop operational strategies to use the modeling to reduce risk and crime. Then for the rest of the year the department largely took over.
The program targeted shootings, aggravated assaults, robberies and burglaries. Risk terrain modeling was used monthly to forecast risky places for crime — about 1 percent of the city. Those places got extra police attention, and facilities were secured, brighter streetlights installed and abandoned properties were demolished or sealed.
It worked better than expected. Atlantic City homicides and shootings in 2017 fell 26 percent from the year before. There were 36 percent fewer violent crimes overall. Robberies declined by more than a third.
Similar risk terrain modeling worked in Chicago, too. Districts there last year saw double-digit drops in shootings and homicides.
The approach looks like a breakthrough in going beyond historical data to prevent crime by identifying factors that make it more likely. If the National Institute for Justice study confirms its effectiveness in comparison to matched control areas using traditional policing, Rutgers and Atlantic City will have shared in the start of a new era in crime reduction.
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