Police Data-Mining Done Right 321
enharmonix writes "Courtesy of Bruce Schneier, it's nice to hear something good about data mining for a change: predicting and stopping crime. For example, police in Redmond, VA, 'started overlaying crime reports with other data, such as weather, traffic, sports events and paydays for large employers. The data was analyzed three times a day and something interesting emerged: Robberies spiked on paydays near cheque cashing storefronts in specific neighbourhoods. Other clusters also became apparent, and pretty soon police were deploying resources in advance and predicting where crime was most likely to occur.'"
The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Club (Score:3, Interesting)
A hole in space. [amazon.com] Larry Niven.
Are the police going to share the location information?
I might want to watch. Cops live!
Interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
On a side note - I'm willing to bet that if someone had asked most street cops in that area - they wouldn't have needed software or data mining tools to tell you that cash checking places in bad parts of town, on pay days were areas of higher crime.
Re:That's some fine police work, Lou. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's some fine police work, Lou. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:That's some fine police work, Lou. (Score:2, Interesting)
"most qualified" (Score:3, Interesting)
now ask yourself why your stellar qualifications aren't met in new recruits. gee, maybe it has something to do with the general attitude towards cops? highly qualified people seek out jobs that are highly rewarding. if the general populace doesn't reward them with a feeling of gratitude for just doing their job, and in fact outright hates them, then you tend to not get qualified people. imagine that. treat cops like shit, get shitty cops. what a wacky consequence, huh?
in my mind, cops are like teachers. you think the power to use force and spy on people is a big deal? how about the power to shape young people's minds? both professions are extremely powerful, and yet both professions get little respect, teacher's financially get shitty little respect
it's so odd to me, but there it is: hostility, fear, negativity, disrespect, hatred... if society has a problem with their cops, society needs to look at it's own attitude towards the profession as the culprit, not the actual cops themselves
we now return you to your regulalrly scheduled cop-bashing thread
gee, i wonder why cops don't live up to your high standards (rolls eyes)
Re:That's some fine police work, Lou. (Score:3, Interesting)
That;'s what CompStat in NYC does (Score:3, Interesting)
The NYPD's CompStat system [wikipedia.org] has been doing that for about ten years now. It's working reasonably well. At first it was really effective, because career criminals tend to fall into predictable patterns. Crime in NYC has dropped enough that there's more randomness, and prediction is less effective.
heh ;-) (Score:3, Interesting)
of course there are cops that take out their frustrations on innocent people. these cops are far and few between though, and they always quickly overstep their bounds in such a way as to be removed from the street
meanwhile you talk about rudeness, rough handling, screaming and threats being the norm. so there seems to be a disconnect somewhere, since cops just don't go apeshit for no reason. cops are human beings. they act the same way you and i do. and yet you want to impart on us that cops are some sort of strange exotic force that is always abusing your fragile sensibilities. right
what's interesting about your anecdotes is that you don't frame any of these behaviors in any context. not that you deserved to be rudely treated, ever, no matter what you did. but it makes your depiction of cops nonetheless less trustworthy, because you seem to conveniently forget to mention aspects of your own behavior, any behavior, good or bad, that would make a cop go apeshit, regardless of you deserving it or not: miscommunication, for example
you were just merrily going along, and on most occasions, suddenly there were cops abusing you. "how'd that happen?" pffft
abcd...wxyz
doing nothing wrong...suddenly being abused by cops
hmmm- i wonder what the
i know people like you, who think like you, who tell anecdotes like you: you are always the victims, and never the aggressors, and you always wind up being victimized by the wheels of justice, somehow. of course, knowing something of the actual lives of the actual people who view their lives this way, i know some of what they edit out of their interesting depiction of themselves as constant victims
you leave too much out of your own bad behavior in how you see your life my friend. i don't trust you. you have a blind spot on your conscience when it comes to seeing your bad behaviors, i think, from what i know of people who's lives are led like you depict your life. always getting in run ins with the cops, and they constantly speak of their essential innocence and victimhood at the hands of angry pigs. never doing anything wrong (actually doing plenty wrong)
so all i have to say to you is "uh huh. right"
Re:scanning the comments here on slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
That same cop that is infringing on your "right" to speed by hitting you with radar and fining you for having jammers is also the same cop that pushes you to the ground and takes a bullet for you when someone decides to hold up the convenience store. Guess what, even off duty, cops frequently wind up doing their job in emergency situations like this because that is what they were trained to do. Unfortunately for them, they usually don't have all their protective gear when something like that happens, so that bullet is far more likely to be fatal. I would hate to think how you would feel if you had just hastled that cop a day or two before for pulling you over for something.
Much like the military, the police force really is one of those jobs that "just doing their job" actually has to take precedence over their personal feelings. They have to rely on what the politicians decide and enforce that. I mean...if you have a military and police force just doing whatever they want...that is generally a really bad police state kinda environment. When you have them following orders one way or another, you just have to bear responsibility for putting the clowns in place that gave them the stupid marching orders. The solution is to fix the clowns and quit bitching about the people who are ultimately the few that are willing to make sacrifices for others which is rare enough, but they are also willing to potentially sacrifice their lives, which in our whiney self serving culture is all but nonexistant.
Actually, I believe they do (Score:3, Interesting)
He's right. Just another way to impress public... (Score:2, Interesting)
I worked for a decade in the IT division of one of the largest and most automated police departments. I know whereof I speak.
So one day a lieutenant with visibility gets the idea of buying a mapping and data-mining system and pushes it up the chain with gee-whiz descriptions (like those in the OP) of how crime can be predicted. I did simulation and analysis of the proposals and concluded that there was little to no value in the proposed projects. Everything that could be predicted by the system was already being done by experienced cops and detectives. But nobody wanted to hear that: they wanted a show-and-tell for the public.
$20 million later what do they have to show for it? A system that prints slides of criminal incidents for the chief to show when he meets neighborhood associations. Despite throwing systems and people into prediction, they have come up with absolutely nothing new.
Unless your entire police force is composed of total morons, such systems are not cost-effective.
Re:scanning the comments here on slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Cop work is criticized because when it is abused, it is one of the most damaging and dangerous aspects of our society, and it is abused every day by a large number of cops.
Police intervene in time to prevent a crime in only a few percent of all crimes. Most of the time, they don't even investigate robberies. If you're robbed you call them and hope you have insurance.If someone attacks you, you fight them or shoot them, and call the police afterwards so that they don't come for you when the body is found.
I know a lot of cops. My brother was a cop before he went into the private sector. Every cop I know has a "funny" story about abusing their power, most of them not even realizing that their story is about abuse of power. They don't even think about it that way. The problem is incredibly widespread.
Make no mistake. The police mandate is to punish, not to protect. They have no legal responsibility to protect the people and most cops if asked, will tell you you should have a gun and protect yourself. Legally, the police can willfully ignore a crime in progress even if they claim they are going to respond and even when this results in people being beaten and repeatedly raped while occasionally sneaking a phone call to the police who then ignore them.
Being a cop has plenty of perqs. You can usually break the law with impunity, and many of them do. Not that it is all roses, but most of the people I know who became cops did so because they like having power over others. I've heard more than one police officer say they became a cop because they wanted to be able to shoot someone without going to jail.
I'm grateful to the few cops I know who really try to do the right thing, although I disagree with many of their opinions as to what the "right thing" is. At the same time I recognize that our law enforcement system is seriously broken and many people are rightly critical of the police. The system lends itself to abuse and recruits people likely to commit abuses. As citizens we should all look critically at our government and be on guard against abuses. The police is simply on branch of government where that abuse has direct and dire consequences to average citizens.
Re:scanning the comments here on slashdot (Score:2, Interesting)
I've reported a number of incidents to the police, over a period of years, and not once have they followed up with even a report.
Couple of examples:
1. I had five or six little kids in a car - we'd gone to the video store to rent a movie - and this punk walked up before we drove off and threatened to pull a gun on me because I was the brother of some kid with whom he had beef. I'd never seen this kid before. I reported it, bringing along one of the kids with me as a witness. Nothing. Gave them the punk's name, etc. - couldn't be bothered.
2. Someone else nearly ran me off the road, and then, thinking it was great sport, they went around the block to come up behind me and did it again. I followed them until I could get their plate and immediately reported it to the police. Made the effort to go down to the station to report it in person. Nothing. Not even a write-up to file in the circular file.
I did once park my motorcyle outside a state police barracks when it was too bloody cold and I couldn't ride any further. When I went back the next day to pick it up, the police, being the nice sort they are, had left a ticket for non-inspection. Yep, serving and protecting, alright...
Don't forget the power-tripping. I talked with a recent HS graduate who said he wanted to get into police work. Surprised, I asked why. Basically, it boiled down to the ability to stick it to people. Yeah, comforting thought, having this kid on the police force.
And, yes, we call on them first, but, really, what else are we supposed to do? Against all better judgement, we can hold out the hope that, just maybe, the cops will bother to help us, but I wouldn't hold my breath. Besides, I can't just pick up my six-shooter and start blasting the people about whom I'm calling.
Nothing new (Score:1, Interesting)
The some damm liberal activist noticed cops showing up in the poorer areas on the days that welfare checks came out... Never mind that the number of muggings, knifings, and murders went down 60-70% with the cops on concentrated patrol in those areas - it was declared profiling and thus deemed illegal and unconstitutional.
Re:The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Cl (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the difference between "civilian police forces" and an "occupation army". Why do you think police have become so militarized? It's not because the criminals are worse than they were 70 years ago.
Re:The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Cl (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, in many places they do. Beat cops and homicide cops often have somewhat amicable relationships with drug gangs so that they have informants when violent crimes happen. Narcotics cops are another issue, but they don't walk beats and it's rarely useful to arrest low-level players who are selling at street corners.
Re:The Last Days of the Permanent Floating Riot Cl (Score:4, Interesting)