Benefits and Pitfalls of Predictive Policing

With the rise of Big Data, so-called Predictive Policing for law enforcement authorities (LEAs) encompasses the provision of analytics tools focused on a number of diverse tasks like e.g. identifying crime hot spots areas, potential suspects, or crime series patterns to forecast possible incidents. However, the public, media, and specifically citizen rights advocates criticise Predictive Policing as being highly critical for privacy and other fundamental rights of individuals. In contrast to these statements, more efficient tools to ensure security for citizens are needed. In this debate, the controversy oftentimes shows immovable fronts with little understanding for the perspective of the other side. Due to this situation, this paper focuses both on the potential benefits and on the potential pitfalls of these analytics tools to offer a more pragmatic approach. The impact of Predictive Policing on privacy and other fundamental rights of European citizens will be examined with some suggestions for further research in an attempt to enable useful analytics with respect to the privacy and fundamental rights of European citizens.