Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm

Thomas Hargrove is building software to identify trends in unsolved murders using data nobody’s bothered with before.

Robert Kolker Bloomberg Businessweek

On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail, the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few scenes of a David Fincher movie:

“Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?”............The police lieutenant never replied................

 To make matters worse, Hargrove saw that despite a generation’s worth of innovation in the science of crime fighting, including DNA analysis, the rate of cleared cases wasn’t increasing but decreasing—plummeting, even. The average homicide clearance rate in the 1960s was close to 90 percent; by 2010 it was solidly in the mid-’60s. It has fallen further since............

Hargrove has his eye on other possible killers, too. “I think there are a great many uncaught serial killers out there,” he declares. “I think most cities have at least a few.”..........“It makes perfect sense,” Hargrove says. “If you leave the killers to walk the street, why wouldn’t that cause more killings? The answer is, it does.”............To Read Much More....