More Powerful Computers, Less Crime?!

From NYT:

"RODNEY MONROE, the police chief in Richmond, Va., describes himself as a lifelong cop whose expertise is in fighting street crime, not in software. His own Web browsing, he says, mostly involves checking golf scores.

But shortly after he became chief in 2005, a crime analyst who had retired from the force convinced him to try some clever software. The programs cull through information that the department already collects, like “911” and police reports, but add new streams of data — about neighborhood demographics and payday schedules, for example, or about weather, traffic patterns and sports events — to try to predict where crimes might occur."

Here's more.

Wondering whether such technology could be utilized in warfare as well so that military depolyment could be made more efficient. But what if your opponents do the same? That seems to be a major difference between the use of such technology in combating crime and the use of such technology in war. The spending and use of such technology is asymmetric in the case of cops vs gangsters (ie cops have more resources to spend on such technological devices than the bad guys) whereas such may not be the case in war situation.