Can Police Use Data Science to Prevent Deadly Encounters?

Expected to reach 25 billion connected devices by 2020, the emerging class of "internet of things" companies are starting to realize its potential to address global poverty by helping the international development community narrow the gap between data and action.

Corruption in Mexico is ingrained in all systems and interactions. President Vicente Fox and his administration are trying to change this. Their mentality is that for corruption to truly be fought the government needs to actively make change and implement rules to counteract it, and some of Fox's changes are now beginning to see improvements.

Despite advancements in technology in most sectors of life leading to an increase to access of information about practically anything, little is still known about the ocean and its behavioral patterns. Liquid Robotics – a Silicon Valley-based company – is trying to change that. Engineers here have created the "Wave Glider," which essentially acts as a router within the ocean powered by wave energy and solar panels. This invention can transmit data on tectonic activity that has the potential to predict tsunamis.

In 2017, German newsroom Suddeutsche Zeitung began reporting election polling numbers in such a way that the uncertainty of the poll—caused by a limited sample size or respondents lying to pollsters—was visualized in the reporting. Through this method, information is conveyed to readers but in such a way that doesn’t erase uncertainty and doubt about the results.

The Central African Republic is rife with political problems including the lack of a health system, proving problematic for a country where Ebola runs a constant risk. Despite the challenges, the Catholic Scouts Association has stepped up to create and implement programs that aim to "promote vaccination, check out rumors about Ebola, carry messages between rival military factions and more."

In Rochester, NY, the Center for Teen Empowerment, a nonprofit that trains youth in community organizing, personal development, and anti-violence, is working to bring kids off the street and into safety. The program, which started in Boston, is centered on four ideas: jobs (paying the youth hired as organizers), teamwork, agency (letting them build their own activist agendas), and peer influence. While hard to evaluate because of its situational, qualitative nature, city officials, including law enforcement, point to the program as a factor in the decrease in violence across the city.

For 28 years, the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, stripped more than 100 people of U.S. citizenship and deported them for their direct participation in Nazi war crimes. The most successful Nazi-hunting operation in the world, OSI’s painstaking investigations – historical research combined with criminal sleuthing and international diplomacy – pried needed records from other nations’ files in order to prove that post-war refugees who ended up in America had immigrated under false pretenses, hiding their true role in the Holocaust’s extermination camps.

When New York legislators abolished a state law that had long shielded police officers’ disciplinary records from public scrutiny, they were not just responding to recent protests but also to activism over many years by reform advocates and families of victims of police violence. Long-running legal challenges had failed to pry the records loose. But activists – opposed by police unions and their allies – had used public testimony, publicity, and their families’ stories to lay the groundwork for changes that then came quickly after George Floyd’s death sparked nationwide protests of police brutality.

A growing number of governments, companies, and nonprofit organizations are working together with new technology and data to identify fishing vessels that are breaking laws and engaging in human rights violations. Using satellite imagery and tracking signals, for example, a philanthropic company and a nonprofit worked with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to help the Ghanian navy arrest four vessels for illegal fishing practices. Technology by itself won’t stop forced labor and unregulated ships, but it can be helpful for cash-strapped governments looking to increase oversight of their fisheries.

Grand Rapids is working to reform behavioral health services and the way law enforcement interacts with those in a mental health crisis through efforts like its county-run crisis access center. An increased need has led to an expansion of these programs, and the city now has a psychiatric urgent care center, mobile crisis teams that make house calls, social workers who join the police on 911 calls and plans for a 24/7 behavioral health crisis center that will open in November.