The Atlantic City Police Department will be featured on National Geographic television Tuesday night.
"Breakthrough: Predicting the Future" includes a look at "predictive policing."
But rather than focusing on people, it looks at the places where crime is happening and what about that landscape attracts crime.
“Crime isn’t random and crime occurs very frequently at certain places,” co-developer and Rutgers professor, Joel Caplan, explains in the show, produced by director Ron Howard and longtime business partner Brian Grazer,
The show is in its second season of shining a spotlight on the world's leading scientists and how their work is changing the future.
In 2015, the Police Department and Atlantic County Prosecutor's Office partnered with Rutgers University in Risk Terrain Modeling that looks at the geography of crime rather than the demographics of the people who live where the crime happens.
Forfeitures from criminal activity paid the initial cost in 2015. Since then, Rutgers has been doing the work pro bono, including donating the software needed, Caplan explained.
"We don't want to react, we want to be responding before we act," Atlantic City Police Capt. James Sarkos says on the show.
He said police should be judged not on how many arrests are made but on the arrests that don't have to be made.
"We want to be judged by preventing crime," he says. "That’s our ultimate goal."
The show is on at 10 p.m. Tuesday on the National Geographic channel.
