Algorithms Help Identify Violent Gangs in L.A.

Officials from the Los Angeles Police Department recently asked a group of mathematicians at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) to help them determine which violent street gangs were involved in violent crimes that are unsolved even now.

The UCLA group was able to develop a series of mathematical algorithms that can be correlated patterns of known criminal activity among gangs with the location and characteristics of unsolved crimes.

“If police believe a crime might have been committed by one of seven or eight rival gangs, our method would look at recent historical events in the area and compute probabilities as to which of these gangs are most likely to have committed crime,” Andrea Bertozzi explains.

The expert, a professor of mathematics and director of applied mathematics at UCLA, was also the senior author of a new paper detailing the findings, which is published online in the mathematical journal Inverse Problems.