Byte cop

Brett Goldstein maps out Chicago’s crime-ridden spots with his predictive-analysis system.

By Elizabeth Flock

Read it at the University of Chicago Magazine

When Brett Goldstein was six years old, he started writing programs on his parents’ single-circuit-board computer. In fifth grade he was teaching himself programming languages. At Connecticut College a professor told him he’d “maxed out” the curriculum.

In his early 30s Goldstein, SM’05, became IT director at OpenTable, an online restaurant-reservation company. He had been an early employee at the start-up, founded in 1998 in San Francisco. By 2006 he had moved to Chicago, completed his computer-science master’s at the University, and was making six figures at OpenTable, when he surprised colleagues and friends by leaving the company to join the Chicago Police Academy.