As part of their daily activities, police officers often formulate hunches based on observations and other sources of information. Large amounts of crime data already exist in electronic form, so officers have been using information management systems and visualization tools to help sift through this data. Despite the availability of these tools, hunches remain difficult to confirm or deny.

We are pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation recently awarded Azavea a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant to design and evaluate ‘HunchLab’, a prototype system that will enable police officers to develop and evaluate hunches.

‘HunchLab’ was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this ‘data mining’ service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, enabling analysis of the result (learn more). Although ‘HunchLab’ will initially be developed to assist with crime detection, tools such as the Spike Detector and ‘HunchLab’ are applicable in any application where events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns and real estate sales.

‘HunchLab’ is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0637589).