Big Data and Law Enforcement – a Marriage Made in H_______!

When you read the title, whether your mind immediately went for the upstairs "H" or the downstairs "H" probably says something about whether the new applications of Big Data in law enforcement let you sleep like a baby or keep you up at night. You might have thought your choice of "H" related to whether you've been on the receiving end of Big Data in law enforcement but the fact is that practically all of us have, and for those who haven't it won't take much longer to reach you. There is an absolute explosion in the use of Big Data and predictive analytics in our legal system today driven by the latest innovations in data science and by some obvious applications. It hasn't always been so. In the middle 90s I was part of the first wave trying to convince law enforcement to adopt what was then cutting edge data science.