UTAH — A new tech heavy practice in police work could make a huge difference in preventing crime, but some worry the method will tread on citizen’s civil rights.
The method is called predictive policing, and is similar to weather forecasts. Agencies can use data from past arrests to work out what areas are seeing the most crime and who is most often involved in that crime. The concern is that the practice will lead to profiling, or snow ball into predicting behaviors before people even have a chance to form them.
“They are part of our line of work every day,” Lohrke said. “One of the top points of our priorities in policing is protecting civil rights. So I want to be very careful with any new idea of law enforcing in our communities.”