The ability of the Cambridge police to use mathematics to solve crime in this era is a huge development that needs to be applauded. It goes on to affirm that gone are the days that mathematics is used solely for its field alone since our day to day activities of recent involve the use of one form of mathematics or another. Statistics and probability an aspect of mathematics can be used virtually for everything in our society today law enforcement included.
There are numerous benefits that could be derived by using this method of policing used by Cambridge police force.
Crime waves can be examined and assets will be deployed to the locations that need it most based on the statistical evidence thereby saving scarce resources of the society.
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What usually takes a human being three to four days will be done in a twinkle of an eye. The mode of operation, the time and pattern of crime also eliminate the officer’s potential biases with raw data. The programs probability that a crime will occur or reoccur is high when all factors are considered.
It can also serve as a crime prevention tool since it will prevent crime from actually occurring and prevent wrongful conviction in cases where people are too scared to give information about the suspect.
The drawbacks from my perspective are the impact of such program on poor and minority communities as well as its implications for civil liberty. An error could unfairly cast suspicion on a location or individual and this may lead to concentrating on people of color.
Also, the tendency to falsification of data on the part of the law enforcement agents is another aspect that I see as a drawback. This is a computer-based software and is based on GIGO (garbage in, garbage out) which is a computer concept that emphasizes that the quality of output is determined by the quality of input since computers operate on strict logic. The forecast will only be good as the data they are based
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Also, the limited resources of the law enforcement will be directed towards the people who are actually in need of it.
The availability of data pool of which the police can search and identify suspects of multiple crimes will be a plus to the society. For example, the DNA database was recently used to solve a crime that happened in Texas four years ago without any known suspect, but with the help of the database, the suspect was arrested in another State for committing a different crime there and when his DNA was inserted into the system, it revealed all other crimes of which he was a match nationwide.
At my workplace, we use computer-based software to record how many products that are sold hourly every day in order to schedule people to work certain hour but it only considers pre-packaged and ready-to-eat goods. It never put into consideration of the labor and time involved for other products to be available for sale. For example, if a roasted chicken is going to be ready at 10 am, it will schedule an employee at 10 am instead of an hour