Plainfield Police Department predictive policing software fails to predict crimes
The Markup and Wired reported that Geolitica's predictive policing software for Plainfield PD produced thousands of predictions with a success rate under 1 percent across 23,631 predictions, and the department stopped using it.
A software company sold a New Jersey police department an algorithm that was right less than 1 percent of the time.
Key facts
- What
- The Markup and Wired reported that Geolitica's predictive policing software for Plainfield PD produced thousands of predictions with a success rate under 1 percent across 23,631 predictions, and the department stopped using it.
- Incident date
- Oct 2, 2023
- Who
- Geolitica
- Failure mode
- Hallucination
- AI surface
- Algorithmic Decision
- Severity
- Medium
What happened
Geolitica provided Plainfield PD with predictive policing software intended to forecast crime locations. An analysis covering 23,631 predictions from February to December 2018 found that fewer than 100 predictions matched crimes later reported to police, and the department discontinued use due to inaccuracy.
What broke inside the model
- 01 · TriggerA user asks for a fact, a citation, or a figure.
- 02 · Model stepThe model writes a fluent, confident answer.
- 03 · Control gapNothing ties the claim back to a real source.
- 04 · FailureA fabricated fact ships as if it were verified.
- 05 · ConsequenceThe false claim reaches a customer, a court, or the public.
Confidence holds, and even spikes, as the claim detaches from any source.
The system produced a very high number of predictions, around 80 per day for Plainfield, yet the maximum daily crimes observed were only 22, yielding a reported average accuracy far below 1%.
What it cost
Sources
- PressPredictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimesthemarkup.org
- PressPlainfield Geolitica Crime Predictionswired.com
Cite this entry
https://failureindex.ai/failures/plainfield-police-department-predictive-policing-softwaAI Failure Index. "Plainfield Police Department predictive policing software fails to predict crimes" (FI-0193). Realm Labs. https://failureindex.ai/failures/plainfield-police-department-predictive-policing-softwa (indexed Jun 5, 2026).Data fields CC-BY 4.0, prose citation permitted. Incident ID FI-0193. Full dataset at /data.
Note from Realm Labs, the Index steward
How Realm fits
- Prism
- OmniGuard
- AI Detection & Response (AIDR)
This entry sits in the index's predictive wing: a system that scores, ranks, perceives, or steers rather than generates. Realm's runtime layer is built for the generative and agentic systems now moving into these same decision seats, where it watches a model's internal state and holds an unsupported claim or an unchecked action before it commits. The control gap on this record, an automated decision that reached people with no runtime check in front of it, is the same gap. The index keeps predictive failures on the record because the pattern carries straight into the systems shipping today.