(Bloomberg) — Memphis Police Lieutenant Paul Wright arrived at a shooting scene in the city’s Frayser neighborhood on Nov. 17, just as an ambulance was speeding away with the injured victim.
An instant later, a nearby officer pulled out an HTC Corp. smartphone to file a police report. Within an hour, the information would be scoured by International Business Machines Inc. software, helping the Memphis Police Department determine whether the incident was part of a widespread pattern.
Tennessee’s largest city is taking part in one of more than 2,000 so-called smart city projects aimed at helping urban areas, from San Francisco to Rio de Janeiro, use data analysis to cut crime, pollution and traffic congestion. Over a decade, cities will invest $108 billion in related tools, according to Pike Research, creating a windfall for software makers such as IBM, device manufacturers like HTC and Siemens AG, Europe’s top engineering company, Bloomberg Businessweek.com reported.
Crimes such as robberies, burglaries and forcible rapes in Memphis fell to the lowest level in a quarter-century in 2010, reflecting stepped up reliance on technology to fight crime, according to researchers at the University of Memphis.
“It’s not Minority Report—we can’t look at someone’s head and their genes and say they’re going to commit a crime,” said Richard Janikowski, an associate professor at the University of Memphis who has analyzed Memphis crime data. “But can we forecast what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen? Yes, we can.”
While Memphis’s focus has been on reducing crime, other cities such as London are using smart city tools to deal with challenges posed by population growth, as cities attract more people than rural areas for the first time. Last year, about 50.5 percent of the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people, lived in cities, according to a March 2010 report from the United Nations. By 2050, the urban population is forecast to rise to 69 percent.
“It will stress the physical and social infrastructure of cities over time,” said Mark Cleverley, director of public safety solutions at Armonk, New York-based IBM.
Just yesterday, IBM announced plans to buy Curam Software Ltd., a Dublin-based maker of software that helps cities manage social and health-care related services. That follows IBM’s October acquisition of I2, a Cambridge, England-based maker of analytics software designed to help cities combat crime.
“Memphis has been an exemplar of one of the principles of our smarter city work: public safety,” Cleverley said.
Sales of smart city-related technology may rise to $57 billion in 2014 from $34 billion last year, according to researcher IDC in Framingham, Massachusetts.
The approach has its limits in combating crime. Analytics software can’t replace street patrols. Also, too heavy an emphasis on statistics can induce some officials to downgrade the severity of a crime in a bid to make a city’s results look better, said John Eterno, a retired captain with the New York City Police Department who’s now an associate dean in the Department of Criminal Justice at Molloy College in New York.
“It’s like squeezing a lemon: initially the juice comes out easily, and over time it becomes more difficult,” said Eterno, author of The Crime Numbers Game, due to be published in January. “We’ve seen the numbers manipulated because of this tendency.”
Economic slowdown is also causing city governments to curtail spending on certain kinds of technology to cover budget shortfalls caused by lower tax receipts. That could slow the pace of adoption of smart city tools.
Memphis’s data-analysis effort, called Blue Crush, came about after the success of pilot projects, including one where 5,000 sexual assault cases were examined by variables including location and time of day. Researchers learned that women in low-income neighborhoods were being attacked while using pay phones at convenience stores at night. The phones tended to be located around the corner of the building in poorly lit areas.
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