Andy Wheeler

New blog post, showing how to use log-probs to set the threshold for classification tasks (to get a specific recall or false positive rate)

Example toxic comment classification, even if True is under 1.2e-09, you should classify it as toxic to get 95% recall.

crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

Part of the rub with LLMs is that they are spiky (can work really well for one thing and be worthless for another), so knowing the tools well enough to test with your personal objectives are important.

Large Language Models for Mortals book released Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python

See my book for a walkthrough of using Google Antigravity, crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20..., as well as other coding tools.

Using Gemini.md to define how to set up conda for sub-agent

For the LLM tip of the day, to properly set up agents in the different LLM coding tools requires understanding python environments.

Claude code inherits from the terminal, Antigravity does not. But you can just tell Antigravity the correct entry point in `http://Gemini.md`.

I have a new book out -- Large Language Models for Mortals: A Practical Guide for Analysts with Python

This is an entry level book focused on using the foundation model APIs. Includes examples for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and AWS.

crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

I did a poll on LinkedIn that may be of interest to a few of my followers here. Would you prefer video/audio/written short form report. 1/3 preferred audio or video.

All college level knowledge workers.

Sponsor @simonw on GitHub Sponsors I'm building Datasette, LLM, sqlite-utils and a host of other related tools to make data analysis for small data (where small = "less than a TB") as productive as possible, and publishing a signifi...

I just sponsored @simonw. Go Sponsor your open source dependencies! You can join me at: github.com/sponsors/sim...

Part time product design positions to help with AI companies Recently on the Crime Analysis sub-reddit an individual posted about working with an AI product company developing a tool for detectives or investigators. The Mercor platform has many opportunities…

Recently someone shared a Mercor link on the Crime Analysis subreddit to help with AI product design. I collected a few different positions Mercor is recruiting for that may be of interest to my network -- writers, GIS, gov workers, and more.

andrewpwheeler.com/2026/01/15/p...

Planning an Experiment in Increasing Arrest Rates Planning an Experiment in Increasing Arrest Rates example in R

New blog post, R code showing how to plan how long to monitor an intervention intended to increase arrest rates

crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

Job info

Looking to hire part time help at Crime De-Coder. Get in touch or forward to interested students. crimede-coder.com/contact

Forecasts need to have error bars Richard Rosenfeld in the most recent Criminologist published a piece about forecasting national level crime rates. People complain about the FBI releasing crime stats a year late, academics are wor…

While I am open to more serious structural work, the current state of the field in those regards is pretty poor. Hence 30 years later, we still debate the great crime drop, and most crim work is "hey here is a new pet measure", andrewpwheeler.com/2023/11/19/f...

We don't know what causes wide spread crime trends

Blog post for the new year is a reprint of a Criminal Justician post I did, We don't know what causes wide spread crime trends.

crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

Year in Review 2025 and AI Predictions For a brief year in review, total views for the two different websites have decreased in the past year. For this blog, I am going to be a few thousand shy of 100,000 views. (2023 I had over 150k vi…

New blog post, year in review and putting together my predictions on whether AI will take all of our jobs.

Short answer no I do not think that will happen, and it may induce demand for more work in the end.

andrewpwheeler.com/2025/12/24/y...

YouTube video by Benn Jordan We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds. 🫥

Really important video about lack of physical security, and various lack of data security measures in Flock cameras.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0g...

Coding Agents Risk Leaking Secrets Coding agents can leak secrets using exfiltration techniques. Here I tell you how to stop them or limit the harm.

New blog post on Crime De-Coder, coding agents risk leaking secrets.

I discuss two approaches to limit this risk. Whitelist IP were secrets can work from, or whitelist websites websearch tools can use.

crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

Advice for crime analyst to break into data science I recently received a question about a crime analyst looking to break into data science. Figured it would be a good topic for my advice in a blog post. I have written many resources over the years …

New blog post on advice for crime analysts looking to break into data science. Learn a programming language (python is most popular), and pick up some machine learning or LLM skills.

Those are the minimal skills needed for entry level data science jobs. andrewpwheeler.com/2025/11/21/a...

ArDrive Secure, permanent storage.

Another application for ARDrive and academics, pre-registrations

app.ardrive.io#/file/9badda...

Can see my grant with Arnold pre-reg data analysis plan, permanently available for everyone. I cannot delete this!

Graphs are better than tables for CompStat A graph is worth 1000 tables for CompStat

New blog post on Crime De-Coder, a graph is worth 1000 tables, crimede-coder.com/blogposts/20...

There are many patterns just looking at a count of pre vs post crimes cannot tell you in traditional CompStat style tables.

Seasonal chart of Chicago robberies shows 10 year lows

Example in crimepy library, github.com/apwheele/cri...

What to show in your tech resume? Jason Brinkley on LinkedIn the other day had a comment on the common look of resumes – I disagree with his point in part but it is worth a blog post to say why: So first, when giving advice I try t…

New blog post, what I think you should show in your tech resume

andrewpwheeler.com/2025/11/01/w...

I translated my book for $7 using openai The other day an officer from the French Gendarmerie commented that they use my python for crime analysis book. I asked that individual, and he stated they all speak English. But given my book is w…

Because my python book was written in quarto, it is pretty easy to translate to other languages using LLMs.

New blog post with code links, costs a total of $7. andrewpwheeler.com/2025/10/25/i...

I have a few more European followers on here so will give this a shot -- I am doing translations of my python book to French/Spanish. I used openai for the first pass, and would like to find a French speaker for copy-editing.

Spanish copy-edit had a total of 77 suggested for 310 pages.

CrimConsortium Memberships - Membership Management Software CrimRxiv is open access—and it will always be free for authors and readers. Our work is a communal effort. Through the CrimRxiv Consortium, we in ...

If you are interested in supporting open science in criminology, consider joining the CrimConsortium

app.joinit.com/o/crimconsor...

Paying members help keep the lights on, but if you care about open science in crim, consider joining as a free member.

Recording your mouse and keyboard with python The differently LLM providers have released computer use tools, Google’s Gemini being one of the most recent ones. They way these work, it submits and image, and then does tasks given general instr…

New blog post, having python record your keyboard and mouse and replay those events, andrewpwheeler.com/2025/10/10/r....

This is a way to automate workflows that are not directly scriptable.

I scraped the Crime solutions site Before I get to the main gist, I am going to talk about another site. The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) paid RTI over $10 million dollars to develop a forensic technology center of excellence…

Given that NIJ stopped funding additional development of Crime Solutions, I scraped the website and archived the reviews in a permanent location using ardrive.

andrewpwheeler.com/2025/09/26/i...

Crimversations:

www.crimrxiv.com/pub/lciht0xi...

And I would have got away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids": Experimentally falsifying Ghost Criminology, by Ian Adams

Aoristic analysis of commercial burglaries

SNA call-ins and reached graph

Time series analysis of outliers using Poisson z-score and seasonal charts.

DB Scan hotspots in Dallas

It is soft-launched, but my python package `crimepy` is intended to contain most of the work in my career. github.com/apwheele/cri...

Recommend reading The Idea Factory, Docker python tips A friend recently recommended The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. It is one of the best books I have read in awhile, so also want to recommend to th…

Book review on the Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation.

Had no idea Bell had its hand in so many of the building blocks of modern computing. It is also interesting how science + engineering can come together to build great things.

andrewpwheeler.com/2025/09/02/r...

Sworn Dashboard Sworn Officer Rates over Time

Wrong link, here is the correct one to the sworn dashboard, crimede-coder.com/graphs/sworn

CRIME De-Coder Crime Analysis Consulting | Process Automation | Computer Coding

Can check out individual cities at crimede-coder.com