AST Digital Magazine September 2017 AST Digital Magazine September 2017 | Page 6

Volume 16
September 2017 Edition
As part of the contract, the company provided a
full-time crime analyst experienced in using the
software, who works side by side with a six-mem-
ber team of Stockton Police Department crime
analysts and staff.
The new program was named Project Forebode,
which stands for forecast-based deployment.
ACA Analytics, LexisNexis
The same is true to establish the forecast for
February 2017 (i.e., August through January),
and so on.
Stockton Police Department
It took time for the program to get up and running
– selecting the databases and time periods to be
included, customizing the predictive model, train-
ing the department’s analysts in its use.
Domestic violence incidents that included use of
a firearm were excluded, since domestic violence
is a different kind of crime, often involving chronic
behavior.
Implementing the program
Project Forebode is comprised of three phases:
Phase I – Data Testing
Initially, the analysts had to establish a base-
line of the occurrence of violent firearm-related
crimes from before this new, targeted approach
to assigning police resources, in order to be able
to judge the effectiveness of the strategy. Crime
data from 2014 served as that baseline
Historic mapped data also comes into play; the
department identified areas within their six dis-
tricts that were accounting for 30 percent of all
gun crimes in the city and focused on generating
forecasts for those areas.
Forecasts based on t