18: Predictive Policing Will Fail Without Transparent Data and Context w/ Professor Jerry Ratcliffe

There were 114 officer suicides this year.

Which is a horrible, tragic number, but not--and this is important--statistically worse than average for the general population.

See, without context, data doesn’t mean anything.

On a recent episode of Pinpoint, I got to interview Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor with the Department of Criminal Justice at Temple University, about a slew of things in predictive policing from a data-driven, academic perspective.

“You only really understand what a number means when you compare that number to something else,” Professor Ratcliffe said.