Not quite Minority Report yet

In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise and his police organization can predict crimes, get to the crime scene before the bad guy does, and arrest the culprit before the deed is done. (That user interface of that "screen" which is used to assemble content like video, pictures, documents and audio, is very cool.)

Looks like those predictive analytics, that are gradually becoming mainstream in business applications such as sales forecasting, campaign management, or customer churn reduction, have also caught on in the New York Police Department. According to this Journal News report, some algorithm has predicted that a particular Yonkers street was about to be place of a crime, and so the NYPD sent the cops on patrol in the area, who were able to arrest the two punks and return the robbed cell phone.

Of course, it could have been pure luck, and there are areas in New York (as in every other metropolitan city) that allow those predictions simply based on experience and a wet finger in the wind. However, two catch the bad guys is certainly not limited to the streets of New York, Chicago, London, or Amsterdam. How about the white collar crimes on Wall Street and in the executive ranks? That's where predictive analytics should be also applied, so that we don't have another Enron, Worldcom, or Tyco case.