Predictive policing is old, and has been done in consultation with universities before. There are papers on predicting crime vs criminals, predicting by time and address, predicting by age, etc., including discussion on whether this leads to uneven enforcement on minorities. It would be surprising to expect law enforcement to go towards less statistical and software usage.
What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
China perfected this all for us and now the U.S. government can piggyback off of their practices... great.
Serious note - the below is such a scary concept. There is a line somewhere and this feels like you are starting to cross it... both place-based and person-based predictive policing sound ripe for profiling / instigating actions that police can use as a reason to arrest an otherwise harmless person.
"Predictive policing programs are another illustrative example showing how data, surveillance technology, and a system of automated policing work together to spy on, search, and, ultimately, control Americans who have not committed or been convicted of a crime.
Predictive policing is premised on the idea that historical data of crime, demographics, socioeconomics, and geography can be used to forecast future incidents. Knowing where crime is likely to occur again, police try to intervene beforehand and prevent it.
Broadly there are two kinds of “heat maps” produced by predictive policing models: place-based, which uses less data to try to avoid systemic pitfalls of relying on crime and demographic data and surges police into specific areas, and person-based, which tracks and creates a list of “high-risk” individuals by combining a person's criminal history with an analysis of their social network. "
This is dumb. Predictive policing algorithms predict where the police will be, not where crime takes place: as crime data is simply a measurement of policing activity.
If there is bias in policing, it would therefore be amplified.
Wow, they're even calling it "Predictive Policing". Here's my prediction: By 2020, we will have fully automated arrest warrants being served and executed based solely on big data analysis, and the legality of that practice will be working its way through the courts.
Not only is omarforgotpwd right, but the article is completely wrong with regard to predictive policing. It was invented by the LAPD w/ the help UCLA researchers in 2008. It is not the result of military research, and was not used by the military until recently. LAPD has repeatedly been credited with it since 2008.. and I was not able to find a single link that backed up the article's claim that it came from the military.
And the program is far from futuristic. Basically, if a certain type of crime has happened in an area recently, the LAPD patrols the area more often. Big deal.
I’m biased, so I would give the most weight to what the computer science department says.
Predictive policing absolutely does work in some aspects. The opposite of predictive policing is to have all beat cops equidistant from each other in their jurisdiction. This is clearly wrong. The next step is to have cops near population centers, then around areas where there have been more reports, requests, etc. After that you move to time to day. Where you place cops during the day vs night is clearly different. Shops close, bars open. Places where young adults vs seniors gather will clearly have different coverage. Pretty much every study in the subject shows people age out of crime. This is used as supporting evidence against lifetime sentences and geriatric incarceration.
I have to assume only the most naive software will have an algorithm that uses secondary indicators / simplest predictive techniques would get such attention. For example “black neighborhoods” (that happen to be poor, with no other stats other than other departments say they have issues with black neighborhoods) and self fulfilling prophecies (we put most cops at location X and what a surprise, that location had the most arrests, w/o looking at the arrests themselves)
> LAPD's mild-sounding "predictive policing" technique, introduced by former Chief William Bratton to anticipate where future crime would hit, is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. military, based on "insurgent" activity in Iraq and civilian casualty patterns in Afghanistan.
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.” - Albert Einstein
Predictive policing systems seem like they will be very difficult to properly validate. On the one hand, it could go like the drug industry where there are bodies "testing" potential solutions, but the money, incentives, and sheer noise make the results highly suspect. On the other hand, cities and towns may prove to be a good experimentation framework, in the same way that laws are "tested" at the country/state level. I'm curious to see if much useful will come out of this, and how long it will take.
This appears to be the primary concern raised in the article. But surely data scientists could put in guards against this, such as weighting the crime count versus the time spent policing the area? In fact, presumably any functional predictive policing system must already do that, else you'd just tend towards policing one area incredibly intensively.
If they are concerned about the police arrest stats or racism biasing the data set, they could keep the input to something hard to interfere with, like where murders occur or where crimes are reported by the public, rather than where arrests occur.
My opinion is that predictive policing does need regulation, but banning it entirely, to me, seems like an overreaction that will over time result in much less effective use of police resources. I suppose time will tell.
Predictive policing is quite the buzz word these days. IBM (via SPSS) is one of the big players in the field. The most common use case is burglary, I suspect because that's somewhat easy (and also directly actionable). You rarely find other use cases in academic papers (well I only browsed the literature a couple of times preparing for related projects).
The basic idea is sending more police patrols to areas that are identified as high thread and thus using your available resources more efficiently. The focus in that area is more on objects/areas than on individuals so you don't try to predict who's a criminal but rather where they'll strike.
It sounds like a good enough idea in theory but at least in Germany I know that research projects for predictive policing will be scaled down due to privacy concerns even if the prediction is only area and not person based (noteworthy that that's usually mentioned by the police as a reason why they won't participate in the research). I'm not completely sure and only talked to a couple of state police research people but quite often the data also involves social media in some way and that's the major problem from what I can tell.
My impression from my conversations with police in Ontario is that predictive policing is a force for good. If it's not the fruit of any poison tree, I'm all for it.
They aren’t the only law enforcement agency that attempts to predict future criminals. For example anyone can be put in California crime database called CalGang for activities such as eating lunch with a gang member. Cops will then give extra attention to people in this database. I think as people interested in technology we should be concerned about the algorithms and policies behind data-driven policing.
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-lapd-precision-pol...
and
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-04-21/lapd-end...
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