Precobs (Pre Crime Observation System)
A place-based burglary forecasting system used by Swiss cantonal police since 2013, still running in Aargau but abandoned by other forces after evaluations found no measurable effect on burglary rates.
LogObject AG
Precobs takes recorded burglary reports and looks for clusters in them. Where a burglary shows the characteristics its operators associate with travelling, professional offenders, the system flags a surrounding area as one where further offences are considered likely over a short following period. Patrols are then directed into that area. It does not name individuals, does not score people, and does not predict who will offend. It predicts where, on the basis of what has already been reported.
The underlying assumption is near-repeat victimisation: the observation, well documented in criminology, that a burglary in a street raises the short-term probability of another burglary nearby. Precobs is one of several commercial products built on that idea. Its Swiss vendor is LogObject AG, according to AlgorithmWatch CH's atlas of algorithms used in Swiss public administration.
WHERE IT IS USED
AlgorithmWatch CH records Precobs in use in Switzerland since 2013, across three cantons: Zurich, Aargau and Basel-Landschaft. Basel-Landschaft discontinued it in 2020, on the stated ground that it no longer met the increased requirements of crime analysis. The canton of Solothurn never adopted it and uses a different product, Picar.
The Kantonspolizei Aargau is the force most closely associated with it. SRF, the Swiss public broadcaster, reported on 27 April 2020 that the force had used the software for five years. Netzwoche reported on 1 July 2026 that Aargau still uses Precobs, alongside Picar, and that these systems process case data rather than personal data.
The picture in Zurich is less clear and is not settled here. Swiss reporting distinguishes the cantonal police from the city police, and coverage read while researching this record points in different directions about which body uses what. That is recorded as an open question rather than resolved.
THE CASE FOR IT
The argument its users make is modest and worth stating accurately, because it is more defensible than the marketing around predictive policing generally. Aargau's media spokesman Roland Pfister told SRF: "Die Software fasst keine Einbrecher" - the software does not catch burglars. His claim was that it helps officers be in the right place, and that its purpose is prevention rather than arrest.
That is a claim about patrol allocation, not about foreseeing crime. A force with finite patrol hours has to decide where to send them, and it will decide somehow - by intuition, by yesterday's incident list, or by a clustering algorithm run over the same incident list. Framed that way, the question is not whether the software is clairvoyant but whether it allocates better than the alternative.
It is also, by the standards of this field, unusually contained. It works on offence records rather than on personal data, it produces areas rather than names, and nothing read suggests it feeds individual risk scores or watchlists. Many of the objections that attach to person-based predictive policing do not reach it.
THE EVIDENCE IS CONTESTED
The difficulty is that prevention is close to unmeasurable. SRF put this plainly: the Kantonspolizei cannot prove the software's effect, because crimes that did not happen cannot be counted. The force pointed to burglaries falling by around a third since introduction. SRF noted in the same report that neighbouring Solothurn, which does not use Precobs, saw a comparable decline.
AlgorithmWatch CH goes further, stating that the three cantons using Precobs are nowhere near the best performers and that researchers found no correlation between the system and falling burglary numbers, citing a 2019 University of Hamburg report. It also notes that Swiss burglary rates fell until 2010 - before Precobs was introduced anywhere - and rose again in 2022 and 2023.
The honest summary is that burglary rates moved in ways that do not track adoption of the software in either direction, and that no evaluation read here establishes an effect.
WHY SOME FORCES DROPPED IT
Basel-Landschaft's stated reason, per AlgorithmWatch CH, was that the tool no longer met what the force needed from crime analysis - a capability judgement rather than a finding that it was harmful or unlawful. Solothurn declined to adopt it. Aargau has kept it while acknowledging it cannot demonstrate its value. Those three responses to broadly the same evidence are the most interesting thing about the record.
THE LEGAL POSITION
No statute, regulation or court ruling specific to Precobs was identified for this record. Swiss cantonal police law governs it in general terms, and the canton of Zurich has been debating amendments to its police law since early 2026 covering the use of intelligent analysis systems, which suggests the legal framework is regarded as incomplete rather than settled. No data protection authority finding on Precobs was found.
WHAT IS NOT KNOWN
No cantonal police publication describing Precobs was located for this record; the account above rests on the public broadcaster, a research NGO's atlas and a specialist trade publication. Current usage figures, the number of alerts generated, and any internal evaluation are all unknown. The date Aargau began using it is uncertain: SRF's 2020 report implies about 2015, while AlgorithmWatch dates Precobs in Switzerland to 2013. Whether the Zurich cantonal police still use it is not established. Neither is the position in Germany, where the product has also been deployed and, on reporting not verified for this record, withdrawn in at least one state.