Benefits and Pitfalls of Predictive Policing

Predictive Policing for law enforcement authorities (LEAs) encompasses the provision of Big Data analytics tools for identifying crime hot spots areas, potential suspects, or crime series patterns to anticipate and possibly prevent incidents. However, the public, media, and especially citizen rights advocates criticise Predictive Policing for potentially infringining privacy and other fundamental rights of individuals. In this debate, the controversy often shows immovable fronts with little understanding of the perspective of the other side. Due to this situation, this paper offers a more pragmatic approach. The impact of Predictive Policing on privacy and other fundamental rights of European citizens will be examined with some suggestions for further research in an attempt to enable useful analytics with respect to the privacy and fundamental rights of European citizens.