Location, Inc. launches predictive crime analytics for Canadian market

A Worchester, Mass.-based location-based data provider has launched “the highest resolution crime analytics available in Canada,” providing exclusive United States-Canadian total, violent and property crime comparisons.

A crime heat map for Vancouver. Credit: Location, Inc.

Dr. Andrew Schiller, CEO and founder of Location, Inc. said in a press release earlier this week that “with seamless national coverage of violent and property crime risk for any address, our exclusive data now provides both U.S. and Canadian insurers with out-of-the-box predictive analytics to understand and proactively manage exposure to crime risk.”

For its Canadian crime analytics, Location, Inc. collected raw data reported from 544 “Police Service Areas” for the country and passed this crime incident and severity information through “hundreds of sophisticated spatial algorithms” to process the approximately 800,000 reported crimes. “The result is nationally comparable crime data of unprecedented accuracy, with seamless coverage for every dissemination area (Canada’s smallest, standard geographic area for census data) and address in Canada,” Location, Inc. reported in the release.

“Currently, there is no easy way for insurers in Canada to leverage predictive violent and property crime analytics in their underwriting, claims, actuarial and marketing departments,” said Dr. Schiller. “With this release, Canadian insurers can now take advantage of a precise, prebuilt solution to help them compete in a digital marketplace by streamlining operations, eliminating risks in the early stages of the underwriting process, improving in-house or external modeling results, and strategically routing potentially fraudulent claims to special investigative units (SIUs).”

Over 100 U.S. insurers access the company’s crime risk analytics via application program interface or bulk file processing, with the same “consumption options” now available to Canadian insurers, the release said. Location, Inc.’s crime analytics also contain no red-lining, and no data about race, ethnicity, ancestry, language, religion, any protected class, income, educational attainment or occupations.

Location, Inc. is a geographic research and data mining company born of university research and a provider of location-based data and tools used by corporations for risk analysis. The company specializes in location analysis, quantifying and mapping of crime and security risks, structure fire risk, demographic and school data information products, and location-based decision-making tools for businesses and consumers. More than 65 million people and businesses have used the company’s data and services since its inception in 2000.