Academics Confirm Major Predictive Policing Algorithm Is Fundamentally Flawed (vice.com) 145
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Last week, Motherboard published an investigation which revealed that law enforcement agencies around the country are using PredPol -- a predictive policing software that once cited the controversial, unproven "broken windows" policing theory as a part of its best practices. Our report showed that local police in Kansas, Washington, South Carolina, California, Georgia, Utah, and Michigan are using or have used the software. In a 2014 presentation to police departments obtained by Motherboard, the company says that the software is "based on nearly seven years of detailed academic research into the causes of crime pattern formation the mathematics looks complicated -- and it is complicated for normal mortal humans -- but the behaviors upon which the math is based are very understandable."
The company says those behaviors are "repeat victimization" of an address, "near-repeat victimization" (the proximity of other addresses to previously reported crimes), and "local search" (criminals are likely to commit crimes near their homes or near other crimes they've committed, PredPol says.) But academics Motherboard spoke to say that the mathematical theory that is used to power PredPol is flawed, and that its algorithm -- at least as pitched to police -- is far too simplistic to actually predict crime. Kristian Lum, who co-wrote a 2016 paper that tested the algorithmic mechanisms of PredPol with real crime data, told Motherboard in a phone call that although PredPol is powered by complicated-looking mathematical formulas, its actual function can be summarized as a moving average -- or an average of subsets within a data set. "The academic foundation for PredPol's software takes a statistical modeling method used to predict earthquakes and apply it to crime," reports Motherboard. "Much like how earthquakes are likely to appear in similar places, the papers argue, crimes are also likely to occur in similar places. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor of computing at the University of Utah and a member of the board of directors for ACLU Utah, told Motherboard that earthquake data and crime data are, naturally, collected in different ways."
"I would say in our mind, the key difference is that in earthquake models, you have seismographs everywhere -- wherever an earthquake happens, you'll find it," Venkatasubramanian said. "The crux of the issue really is that to what extent are you able to get data about what you're observing that is not also totally on the model itself." "If you build predictive policing, you are essentially sending police to certain neighborhoods based on what what they told you -- but that also means you're not sending police to other neighborhoods because the system didn't tell you to go there," Venkatasubramanian said. "If you assume that the data collection for your system is generated by police whom you sent to certain neighborhoods, then essentially your model is controlling the next round of data you get."
The company says those behaviors are "repeat victimization" of an address, "near-repeat victimization" (the proximity of other addresses to previously reported crimes), and "local search" (criminals are likely to commit crimes near their homes or near other crimes they've committed, PredPol says.) But academics Motherboard spoke to say that the mathematical theory that is used to power PredPol is flawed, and that its algorithm -- at least as pitched to police -- is far too simplistic to actually predict crime. Kristian Lum, who co-wrote a 2016 paper that tested the algorithmic mechanisms of PredPol with real crime data, told Motherboard in a phone call that although PredPol is powered by complicated-looking mathematical formulas, its actual function can be summarized as a moving average -- or an average of subsets within a data set. "The academic foundation for PredPol's software takes a statistical modeling method used to predict earthquakes and apply it to crime," reports Motherboard. "Much like how earthquakes are likely to appear in similar places, the papers argue, crimes are also likely to occur in similar places. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a professor of computing at the University of Utah and a member of the board of directors for ACLU Utah, told Motherboard that earthquake data and crime data are, naturally, collected in different ways."
"I would say in our mind, the key difference is that in earthquake models, you have seismographs everywhere -- wherever an earthquake happens, you'll find it," Venkatasubramanian said. "The crux of the issue really is that to what extent are you able to get data about what you're observing that is not also totally on the model itself." "If you build predictive policing, you are essentially sending police to certain neighborhoods based on what what they told you -- but that also means you're not sending police to other neighborhoods because the system didn't tell you to go there," Venkatasubramanian said. "If you assume that the data collection for your system is generated by police whom you sent to certain neighborhoods, then essentially your model is controlling the next round of data you get."
A city (Score:1, Flamebait)
Have all the skilled police waiting around a low crime neighborhood is going to add to support times in crime filled neighborhoods.
The ability to pack a lot of police into the "neighborhood" that is full of criminals allows a rapid response to crime and criminals.
Call for help get paid police action.
More police are in the area to support the number of calls.
Don't have skilled police waiting around in the better low crime neighborhoods.
The "system" qu
Re:A city (Score:5, Informative)
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No city has the extra police numbers to over police low crime areas and still have enough police for parts of the city filled with criminals.
Crime fills parts of US cities and over time its rather easy to map out, put up on a GUI map.
Every 911 call has to be responded to on time.
No city can just say that many of its police are kept on patrol in a very low crime area that day and the response time in a high crime area will take time.
Police do not want to see that their
Re:A city (Score:4, Interesting)
I think the definitions of under/over-policing are too dependent on the number of police available.
We call an area "over policed" if it seems like there are too many police patrols based on the amount of crime, when it seems to actually be driven by a sense that there are not enough police available in higher crime areas because they are misallocated to low crime areas.
I wonder if these terms would somewhat melt away if there were just more police overall? I would argue that the use of patrol cars and radios have created a false economy that suggests we can get away with too few police because they can be "efficiently" routed to places where crime has been reported. Generally low crime areas become effectively under-policed themselves and then become more susceptible to crimes of opportunity like burglary.
This is exactly what happens in my part of the city where I live, especially once warm weather hits. The crime rate is very low generally, but there's a huge uptick in burglary during spring and summer. Police and civic officials say there's nothing that can be done, mostly due to a lack of resources. The counter-argument is that more police patrols would increase criminal risk and reduce opportunity.
If you consider a thought experiment where the amount of police cars is held very low and most patrolling would need to be done in a non-motorized fashion, you would need more overall police since you couldn't just send patrol cars in response to criminal activity and zero police presence wouldn't be an option, either. Low crime areas would wind up with less criminal opportunity due to a more regular and permanent police presence.
The other dynamic that seems to drive low policing levels in generally low crime areas is the perception that since most of the crimes that do occur are property crimes, they are a low priority because the residents are generally affluent and have insurance which more or less eliminates the "victim".
If property insurance were much more expensive, say most people had a $10,000 deductible or higher and thus were self-insured for all amounts below that, I think property crime would get more police engagement. Victims would be more or less permanently victimized by material losses, since they would be very expensive to replace.
Re:A city (Score:5, Insightful)
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You make a good point. Some crimes are going to be reported regardless of the level of police presence. Murder leaves behind a body that needs cleaning up, and reporting a burglary to law enforcement is penultimate to reporting it to an insurance company.
Some crimes will actually decrease in the the presence of heightened, especially visible, police activity. Many of these crimes, like drug activity, would have gone unreported unless they were interdicted by law enforcement.
In the presence of those tasked
Re:A city (Score:4, Insightful)
Murder yes you're right, unless the area is dealing with a high number of murders. See the case of NYC in the 1970's, 'warm bodies' on the streets made a significant difference in the span of a few years. Burglary you're wrong on, more police or more active patrols decrease the possibility of those types of crimes happening because the possibility of something happening in plain sight makes the individual reconsider their actions. See the "rational choice" theory out of criminology for example. It takes the belief that most people, knowing right from wrong will not take an action unless they fall into three basic groups. First being those who won't ever commit a crime, the second being those that will commit a crime if they know they won't be caught. The third being those who will commit a crime irregardless of circumstances, even if someone is standing over their shoulder. Depending on the studies, those numbers range from 30-40% who will never commit a crime. To the remaining 60% who might or will. Will generally making up 10-25% of that remainder depending on various other factors dealing from generational crime, to social influence.
CPTED(Crime prevention through environmental design) is the basis of reducing crime by deterring the actions of those who "might" and "will" commit a crime. Whether it be more patrols, building designs that don't leave dark areas, motion lights/cameras, and so on. It's also heavily used in internal theft-prevention in every business around the world because it works, and works well. You can turn bad areas that are effectively ghettos into crime free areas by increasing property values, bringing in businesses that employ, reducing petty crime and poor education and so-forth. Having programs like Neighborhood watch or COP(citizens on patrol), to have more eyes looking for crime problems. All of that falls into the CPTED models.
ISSUE IS NOT REPORTING or "noticing crimes" (Score:4, Insightful)
Except the ISSUE IS NOT REPORTING or "noticing crimes" - IT'S PREDICTING CRIMES that's the issue.
Algorithm doesn't notice nor report crimes. It predicts where to send the police.
Resulting in a "garbage in = garbage out" predictive result based on reinforcement of outdated data.
E.g. If there was an arrest of a guy selling pot in front of a local Starbucks last month, and another guy arrested selling meth in a parking lot of a mall - algorithm now dictates through "near-repeat victimization" that both the Starbucks and the mall AND EVERYTHING AROUND THEM are likely locations of future crimes.
And should cops actually notice something in that area aroooouuund the location of a previous crime while being under pressure to fulfill their monthly quotas - it is seen as a validation of the predictive powers of the magical AI.
Rinse and repeat.
It's "Round up the usual suspects!" - only with locations and "supported" by math.
Pretty soon you have cops policing parking lots for broken tail lights and ID-checking everyone around a Starbucks, falling number of arrests for preventable crimes (such as selling drugs or opportunistic crimes) - with actual number of crimes on the increase city-wide.
Cause everyone is listening to the magical algorithm, designed to predict earthquake aftershocks.
Instead of having police patrolling even there where no crimes are being reported - e.g. cause the locals don't trust the police or are afraid of reprisals from the drug dealer next door.
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That would be detected and added in.
Low crime, nice parts of a city would not suddenly become filled with crime.
Crime stays in parts of a city filled with criminals. Thats why the ability to track time works so well.
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Re "- with actual number of crimes on the increase city-wide."
That would be detected and added in.
No, it wouldn't.
Read the bit about people not reporting the dealer next door for the fear of reprisals.
Low crime, nice parts of a city would not suddenly become filled with crime.
Cause the "nice" people there wouldn't go to parts of the city where there are drug dealers but no cops, to buy drugs and take them home?
Or pay a dealer to do that and bring them drugs to their home?
Or cause they would report themselves for doing that?
Possession of drugs IS a crime.
Crime stays in parts of a city filled with criminals. Thats why the ability to track time works so well.
No.
And I'm not sure which sentence makes less sense.
The one which implies that criminals are paraplegics encased in concrete o
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Nearly all police actions other than traffic citations come from dispatches - someone calling in/reporting a crime.
Do you have citation or source for that claim?
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You have managed to prove nothing. You haven't even established a probability of anything based on logic.
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I said you have PROVEN nothing. Starting with 911 calls. People call 911 because of criminal activity, medical emergency, and fire. Also because McDonalds is out of Apple pies, Best Buy won't honor my fake coupon for 110% off, do you know what time it is, and sorry my butt dialed it. But you decided they're all criminal activity. Beyond that, I would find it more likely that a crime a cop actually witnesses is more likely to lead to an arrest than one that happened 30 minutes or more before a cop arrived o
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The locations, distance calculations at a crime with the use of weapons, type of crime, who did the crime and their connection to that area.
The data exists for any part of the USA.
City and state police can now do the same "math" as the FBI did looking g back over years of complex collected crime data sets.
Place more police where crime and criminals are and the wider city is kept much more safe.
Crime and
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I think they are missing that crime is not reported by police. Crime is reported by crime victims.
Corollary: If you do not report a crime, the police will not work the crime. But I'd think that most people understand that issue.
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Crimes certainly are reported by police, in the form of arrests.
Cop sees a drug deal go down. Cop arrests drug dealer. It shows up in the crime stats.
I would guess that very few drug deals get reported by concerned citizens.
Re:A city (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you missed the part where the professor explained that we have essentially complete coverage for earthquake detection. We don't have that for crime, and Americans generally reject the level of surveillance (total) that would be necessary to detect all crimes. If you use a predictive model to focus resources, but that model is trained on previous detections, you need that history to be statistically unbiased. Otherwise the bias tends to perpetuate itself, which is why the guy from the ACLU is concerned.
Re:A city (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A city (Score:4, Informative)
There are lots of murders and burglaries that aren't reported. People disappear in big cities, and unknown bodies are discovered.
This report (from 2009) shows burglary is among the highest reported crimes, at 54%. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n... [statcan.gc.ca]
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People disappear in big cities, and unknown bodies are discovered.
And thus they are reported. They might not be solved, but a dead body discovered goes into the database 100% of the time. It might turn out to be a death due to natural causes, but nobody allows corpses to lie around stinking without telling someone.
I'd venture a guess that the most under reported crimes (particularly in light of your Canadian study) are failed assault/robbery attempts. Where the victim drives the attacker off, possibly with a weapon. The victim might end up in more trouble for possessing
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What you're really looking for in terms of solved crimes is what's called the clearance rate. Or the percentage of crimes reported that are solved. For example, in my town the assault 1(i.e. fist fighting) has a 95% clearance rate. The vandalism clearance rate is about 7%, it's hard to catch people in the act even these days with all the cameras around.
Depending on where you are in Canada, the most under reported crimes are theft under $5k and various victimless crimes like prostitution. The previous co
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What you're really looking for in terms of solved crimes is what's called the clearance rate. Or the percentage of crimes reported that are solved.
No. What I'm looking for is the actual crime rate. Statistics will steer different police departments to select the best tactics to improve the clearance rate on those crimes.
Canada ... granting more leeway to an individual if they go over the proportional line of self-defense
Good. Canada needs to stop coddling criminals.
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Because generally reporting a burglary doesn’t do any good. The only real reason to report is for insurance purposes.
Not quite correct (Score:2)
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Nice poem.
Re:A city (Score:4, Insightful)
No one realized that those parts of the airplanes weren't as important to protect because the planes still returned though they were hit there. Protecting the parts where the returning planes didn't get hit was much more important, as obviously, planes hit there never made it back.
This is called survivorship bias [wikipedia.org]. And systems that try to predict crimes from past crime numbers suffer heavily from survivorship bias.
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Possibly, but note well, divide a uniform crime area into sectors. Each sector has the same level and severity of crime. Flip a coin to decide which sectors get the most police presence. The more patrolled sectors will naturally be the ones where more criminals are caught, and so in the crime report will be "higher crime" areas. They will continue to get more patrols because they will continue to have higher crime stats.
That effect CAN be taken into account in the software, but it isn't.
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Except of course that crime rates can be based on crimes reported by crime victims/observers and you can just throw out the reports directly from officer observations. No one bases crime rates on the number of criminals "caught", or where they are caught. The statistic used is where the crime reported occurred.
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That is at odds with TFA based on people who actually examined the use of the software.
You COULD throw out the reports from police, but they DON'T.
Police presence leads to predictable results (Score:2)
By targeting a portion of a city or neighborhood with more LEOs, you will create more arrests there.
There are undoubtedly several areas in virtually every city that are predisposed to criminal activity... areas that have a high concentration of poor people or others that are resigned to accept more overt peddling of the drug and skin trades, for instance. If you're looking to prove an algorithm's efficacy, deploying additional police personnel and assets to any of these areas will get it done.
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By targeting a portion of a city or neighborhood with more LEOs, you will create more arrests there.
That only works if there's something to arrest people for.
There are undoubtedly several areas in virtually every city that are predisposed to criminal activity... areas that have a high concentration of poor people or others that are resigned to accept more overt peddling of the drug and skin trades, for instance..
So what? Abandon the people living there by letting criminals have free reign? I love that the "solution" to politically inconvenient crime all over the Western world is to simply stop policing said crime because it proves the "wrong" people right. Problem solved, once and for all! ONCE AND FOR ALL!
By all means, send more patrols to the nice, rich neighborhoods. I'm sure they'll be happy about more police presence. After all, their homes get extra pr
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flawed (Score:2)
Taboo topics (Score:1, Insightful)
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Do you want to pay for their education?
Do you pay property taxes, or live in a building where the owner pays property taxes? Then you're paying for their education already.
Everyone knows about the "US spends more per capita on healthcare and we have crappy service!" concept, but how many know that we spend just about the most [ed.gov] per student on education, and have terrible results?
Perhaps the issue isn't the amount of money spent in these areas, but the goals/intent of the Governments who are doing the spending (which is valid for both cases, as G
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A Minority of a Minority (Score:2)
The fact is that the majority of the perps constitute a small minority of the minorities.
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Education is also the second most cost-effective method for reducing crime. You want to make sure you're providing enough of it, efficiently.
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That's the problem; we're number 3 in the world in spending per student [ed.gov], and we're 17th out of 22 in the OECD in high school graduation rates [all4ed.org].
We should pay more attention to Eisenhower's warning about the Government-Education complex [acsh.org], and how it's feeding off of the US taxpayer as much as the military-industrial complex. For example, the DOD budget in 2016 [defense.gov] was $585 billion; Federal and State spending on K-12 education in 2016 was $620 billion [politifact.com]. How many people would guess we spend more on education of K-1
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The problem is that education is left in the hands of local entities. The most the federal government can do is offer grants for doing particular things. I know that when I was in school, much of the money went to computers that we didn't use. The one "computer class" I had was run by this lady who was completely unqualified to teach it.
Meanwhile, with the exception of the AP classes, class sizes remained very large. Standards were lowered because that increased the graduation rate, which made the administr
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Well, in theory those California votes would be balanced out by Texas votes. I'm not saying that we need to get rid of FFA or that a federally run education system shouldn't ensure that the schools are tailored to their regions. Quite the opposite. I know you'll probably find this suggestion obscene, but I think that the legislation should provide the Department of Education broad leeway when structuring the school systems. This would allow for the rural and urban school to have radically different structur
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As someone who attended both a rural and an urban high school, I suspect those statistics don't say what you're implying. At the rural school, the average student did better. But I graduated ranked much higher than I would have at the urban high school with the same GPA. The highest performing students at the urban high school performed better, there were more AP classes provided, and I knew several people who went on to Ivy League or equivalent universities. In the rural high school, the graduation rate wa
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Nice theory, but back in reality the one school system ultimately under the governance of the Federal Government is that of Washington, D.C., where they spend $27K/student/year (twice the national average) in order to rank 2nd to last on math results and last on reading results.
Not sure our goal should be to replicate that "success" elsewhere.
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You know what's funny? Is that US wages effectively stayed flat from ~2002ish until Trump was elected. Hell it was bad enough that the median income here in Canada was above the US median income. What changed though? Policy and action. Bush Jr, and Obama played the same game, ran the same types of policies, dealt with businesses the same way. More regulations, more restrictions, creating more uncertainty, granting more incentives for businesses to "offshore" or simply pick up and move out of the US.
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Wrong about data source (Score:3)
The data fed to the model is not just from police sent to neighbourhoods the model sends them to as suggested. The data is gathered from _all_ police dispatches. So the suggestion that the model is reinforcing its own biases is wrong.
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Useful clarification! It'd be interesting to see if there's a rebuttal from the company that produces this, so that there's at least some form of rounded discussion, rather than the blunt hammer of "rouse the mob" that seems to go for journalism these days.
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That'll be interesting as well, because the company that did this based it off of previous long-hand methods of policing and predictive crime models. An example: In the old days, if you started seeing a rash of tire slashing or vandalism against vehicles you'd put more patrols through that area. This led to a decrease in crime in general, but could also lead to increased crime in other areas as police resources were shifted.
The entire premise of the model isn't new and the complaints about the "broken wi
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Except that if more police are dispatched one some areas than others then naturally they will detect more crime in those areas. Most crime is unreported.
algorithms (Score:5, Informative)
I have mixed feelings about this.
First, the idea that algorithms alone can 'predict' something as subjective, human, and impulse-based as crime is ridiculous, and (I believe) born of a Utopian idea that taking people out of the equation can somehow remove bias, racism, and subjectivity from the process leaving some sort of idealistically mechanical, sterile system. For anyone who's worked in policing, crime prevention, or law enforcement fields, this should be a staggeringly stupid idea. Who's writing such algorithms but other people? On top of that, I expect there are now encrusted layers of ideology, in which results that don't conform to some utopian ideal of demographics are claimed to be 'racist' and formulaically 'corrected' to suit political goals, regardless of the facts of reality.
OTOH there is ABUNDANT work that shows that recidivism, particularly in the worst crimes, is concentrated in a surprisingly small number of individuals. I worked for a police dept where the longest serving officers maintained that 80%+ of the crimes were committed by a handful of families in the 50,000+ person city.
https://www.politifact.com/tex... [politifact.com] lists some examples:
So it's clear that if we could identify this small percent and aggressively police them, we could make a sizable impact on crime.
Doesn't this just show (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, not sure about Sweden in the 80s but in America, even today, our prison system chews you up and spits out broken people. That's been equally well documented.
Finally pre-90s is a bad place to get crime statistics from. Lead in the air was pretty obviously creating unhinged people. Again, there's plenty of studies to back this up because it's the only thing that can explain the across the board drop in crime.
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Why don't you take a look to Canada, which uses a similar method as EU countries in terms of dealing with recidivism. The reality is, the recidivism rate is still around 80% and that's after all the various programs ranging from training to psychological treatments have been applied. Got a lot of people in prison up here for child rape, violent assault, rape, and a lot of people not getting put into prison despite 200+ convictions for violent assaults because "they're natives(aka indigenous population)" a
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Demographic changes, abortion, technology (video games, cashless society, security systems), and economic changes. And maybe also some lead in the air.
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The elephant in the room is that it probably sends more police to minority neighborhoods. But that’s where the crime is at and it isn’t
"controversial" (Score:2, Insightful)
a predictive policing software that once cited the controversial, unproven "broken windows" policing theory as a part of its best practices.
The only thing "controversial" about broken window theory was that it worked.
The fact that it worked really bothered a certain class of people (people who wanted crime to be the fault of something other than criminals).
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That's not solving crime (Score:5, Interesting)
I saw this in my old town (I live in an apartment full of Indian H1-bs now and while they do take my jerbs they're about the least criminal people on earth if you don't count them hacking my cheap router from time to time).
I used to live in a cheap, working class neighborhood. Up the street were crack houses galore. Never once did they bother me. Only trouble I ever had was from a loser friend who's girlfriend robbed me.
I used to wonder why and then I found out. "Broken Window" policing is actually "Busted Heads" policing. My bud lived in one of those crack house apartments following a bad divorce (only thing he could afford/get after getting his credit destroyed). Got robbed, they caught the guy when his apartment manager went into the apartment and recognized his stuff there. They released the guy a few days later and he was still living next door to my bud when he finally got his credit fixed and moved out.
That was OK because they'd kept the crime inside. Every now and then one of them would venture out of their little hell hole and rob a liquor store or something.
The cops would come down like a ton of bricks. Everyone got arrested. And since they all had at least some pot half were probably gonna do a year or two in the clink. Especially the Dads, who would take the rap for the pot so the mom could at least stay out of prison. And during the raid you better believe heads got busted like crazy.
This kind of shit is used to force the lower caste to stay in their lane. Keep their head down. It's the nastiest form of oppression possible. It lets you and me ignore the problem of widespread poverty because when the poor make trouble there's a cop there ready to beat them the fuck down and a private prison system happy to lock 'em up for 3-5 years.
This is also why the drug war hasn't ended. Locking up randos for minor drug crimes is how you keep those folks on edge.
Now, you might be thinking, so what? They're criminals anyway. That's all well and good, but think about it. When Capitalism goes south what's suppose to fix it? The Answer is that Mr Factory Owner won't let the country go to shit because he lives in it. But Mr Factory owner and even his middle class servants can use tricks like this to control the populace why bother? What's to stop him from letting everything go to shit except where he lives? This is where oligarchy comes from.
You're missing the point (Score:2)
And no I'm not a "Fuck the Police" type. They're a product of the system. If nobody calls out the system's bullshit nothing changes.
Re: You mean Profiling (Score:1)
Yes, but profiling is racist.
This is created by a machine using aggregated information of reports of crime (which do not require police presence).
Alternative explanation: humans already know exactly where crime is most likely to happen, but acting as if they know is forbidden. This technology allows them to acheive their goal while having deniability about how they selected the target areas.
To speak plainly, black people commit a lot of crime.
*sigh* (Score:5, Insightful)
Oddly enough, we actually DID do a LEO model years back, which was actually pretty effective, but it encouraged things like community outreach and police/citizen interaction which worked really well for officers on the ground but pissed off lawmakers and 'police unions', so it was largely dropped.
Which gets back to this story and one of the fundamental flaws in such attempts. The decision makers are not interested in solutions that make things better for high crime areas in the first place, the people in those areas are not part of their power block. They want solutions that 'sound right' to people who live elsewhere and confirm what they already believe. Which is exactly what models like this are good at producing. They are kinda like torture... useless for prediction or information gathering, but an excellent political tool for confirming the story your career depends on being 'true'.
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Oddly enough, we actually DID do a LEO model years back, which was actually pretty effective, but it encouraged things like community outreach and police/citizen interaction which worked really well for officers on the ground but pissed off lawmakers and 'police unions', so it was largely dropped.
For several years I lived in walking distance between a police station and a neighborhood responsible for the vast majority of the police calls in the area. I could see the police station from my house, and the troubled neighborhood was a 10 minute walk behind me. I never, not once in five+ years, saw a cop on foot in my neighborhood.
For cops to be effective, they actually need to be part of the community. They can't just be a faceless, quasi-criminal organization which is not accountable to the citizens a
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To be frank, British policing has devolved so badly in the last 30 years that you can't even call it policing. You've got serious issues with the police and local government covering up crimes, with approval of higher-up members of the government. And arresting people for daring to question their actions, followed by rampant political correctness and far too much "well because they're not white..." reasoning in not laying charges. To use it as an example of anything, is to highlight what happens when a
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As usual you have no idea what you're talking about. Thw worst stories you hear on the news are not anything like the average case.
If you think the 70's were notoriously corrupt, the only person who has no idea on what they're talking about is yourself. I'll give you bonus points for at least trying, let me know how much you're liking the fact that unlike in the 1970's, they now let violent criminals simply walk out the door.
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Welcome to Canada, 1975. It took people moving up the chain of police forces to make the change back to a more traditional form of policing. It hadn't fully changed over to the inverse model here until about 1996 or so, even at that the RCMP still operates in the traditional model of top-down. The US like many western nations went heavy-in on the whole "roving police cars is a great idea, especially from great big centralized police stations!" The method you're talking about, with community outreach, le
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Major fail by Mr. Academic... (Score:3)
Important crimes never reported to police (Score:3)
Crime happens everywhere but it is not always reported. The worst, most critical crime in terms of its overall effect upon the public is never subject to a police dispatch. It happens at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and environs in Washington DC. It happens at Wall Street. And at Caracas, Mexico City, Dubai, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and even Geneva. It happens in marble buildings and fancy restaurants and hotels and involves people wearing Armani suits and fake sun tans. These crimes involve investment schemes, trade in drugs & guns, overthrowing governments, usurious loans to third world countries, manipulation of elections, monetary gifts to dictators and warlords, currency manipulations, deforestation for private profit and more. These criminals enrich each other at the expense of billions who suffer from the ravages of war, hunger, disease and deprivation.
The police are not called because these perpetrators are above the law.
That went bad fast! (Score:2)
Did you catch this quote from the article? police shootings between 2011 and 2015 were 3.49 times more likely on average to target black individuals compared to white
Umm... gee... check the murder rates. Blacks kill blacks at a rate six times more than whites kill whites. Which means both they kill and they are