SANTA CRUZ — Santa Cruz police are poised to be the first in the nation to use a new statistical model to predict crime and try to prevent it.

Police recently submitted eight years of crime reports to an applied mathematics professor at Santa Clara University, and he is mapping the time, location and recurrence of crimes to help police predict crime and tailor their patrols. It’s an emerging, national movement called “predictive policing.”

“I think the more you put police in areas where there is more crime, the more efficiently you’re policing the city,” said George Mohler, the Santa Clara University professor doing the research.

Mohler said the goal is not to arrest more people, but rather to have an officer patrolling a neighborhood so that a car burglary, for example, doesn’t happen in the first place.

Zach Friend, a crime analyst for the Santa Cruz Police Department, said he approached Mohler about the project after reading news reports about predictive policing in the fall.

In November, Friend and Santa Cruz police leaders met with Mohler and gave him data from 2002 to 2009 – as well as the city’s 2010 data this week. The data focused on property crimes, including the time, date and location of home burglaries, vehicle burglaries and stolen vehicles.

“The overall model is based on the belief that crime is not random. So with enough data points, you could predict where and when it will happen,” Friend said.

Mohler added, “We don’t view criminals as deviants, it’s people who see an opportunity and take advantage of it.”

If a person sees a laptop computer in a parked car, for example, and a police officer is driving by at the same time, the thief backs off. The crime is prevented, the person is not arrested and the police are more efficient on patrol.

Mohler earned a doctorate at UCLA, where he crunched numbers with crime data from the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments. He expects to return his results to Santa Cruz police in the coming months, and police will decide how to change patrol locations and times within officers’ usual shifts.

The changes will start in February at the soonest, police said.

“We’re the only police agency in the country doing it,” Friend said.

Santa Cruz police now use maps of reported crime, crime statistics, neighborhood complaints and old-fashioned officer intuition to combat crime. In the new system, police anticipate that officers will receive instructions in their roll call meetings before each shift to talk about places and times to perform extra checks, Friend said. Supervisors also might discuss predicted spikes in crime.

Mohler, a 29-year-old assistant professor, said he is doing the work at no charge. He said he wants to build his repertoire of published research.

Mohler said burglars who successfully steal from a home or car often return there because they knew it worked. No one was at a home when it was broken into at 2 p.m., for instance, and burglars often use that knowledge to return or break in to another house in the neighborhood.

In Santa Cruz, Mohler has found that repeat car and home burglaries tend to happen four days after a crime. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, he said, the recurrence takes seven to eight days, Mohler said.

It’s unclear why, but Mohler said that kind of data could help police.

“Whether a person returns four days later or six days later might not be intuitive,” he said.