The Santa Cruz Police Department has initiated a “Minority Report” style program in predictive policing — deploying officers in places where crimes are likely to occur in the future.

Based on models for predicting aftershocks from earthquakes, it generates projections about which areas and windows of time are at highest risk for future crimes by analyzing and detecting patterns in years of past crime data. The projections are recalibrated daily, as new crimes occur and updated data is fed into the program.

Eght years of crime data were fed into the computer program, which breaks Santa Cruz into squares of approximately 500 feet by 500 feet. New data is added each day. Officers are given a list of the 10 highest-probability “hot spots” of the day at roll call. They check those areas during times that they are not out on service calls. Before the program started, they made such “pass through” checks based on hunches or experience of where crimes were likely to occur.