(Credit: Peter Kim/shutterstock)
It’s hard to imagine a nation without an organized police force, but in truth, it’s a fairly modern invention. Crime was once handled locally, often by volunteers and by the will of the ruling power, and it was only in 1829 that the first large-scale, professional force came to be — London’s Metropolitan Police Service, created by Parliamentarian Sir Robert Peel. These police, nicknamed “peelers” or “bobbies” after their creator, wore uniforms selected to make them look more like citizens than soldiers, followed clear guiding principles and strived not only to fight crimes but also to prevent them from happening. The US followed suit less than two decades later, when the nation’s first metropolitan police department was created in New York City in 1844, based on the London model. Law enforcement has evolved a lot since then, of course. And in recent decades, information technology has emerged as a significant player in policing. The September 11 attacks in 2001 led to a radical modernization in American policing that included the advent of so-called Big Data — analysis of large datasets to discover hidden patterns. Knowable asked criminologist and statistician Greg Ridgeway of the University of Pennsylvania how computers — Big Data in particular — are changing policing in the US. Ridgeway is the author of a 2017 article on the topic in the Annual Review of Criminology. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Criminologist and statistician Greg Ridgewayof the University of Pennsylvania. (Credit: JAMES PROVOST)
