Slashdot Mirror
Crime Prediction
pipingguy writes "More than a decade of extensive crime data collection matched with new technology may soon allow police to predict to a surprising degree of accuracy the number and type of crimes that will occur in a given neighborhood one month in advance."
When it was called Minority Report
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Worthless if it doesn't help stop any.
You've got to look at the cause not the effect to make a change. Minority Report just won't work. Normally you can guess these stats based on the demographics of the area as well.
Live in the country? Then you're more likely to get broken into.
Live in Compton? You're more likely to get shot in a drive-by.
Live next to Barbara Streisand? You're more likely to get sued.
The list goes on...
How much did it cost them to predict that crime would happen in drug-infested poor neighborhoods?
Sure, the study showed a little more than that, but you have to question the usefulness.
Mr. Smith, you will commit a murder tomorrow morning at 2:34 PM. You will murder your wife. We are taking you into our custody now.
But what about...
Mr. Smith, you will break free from our custody tomorrow and attack a security guard in the process. Thus, we are taking you into our custody now.
I like paradoxes, but not when they're amber.
I like paradoxes, even though my name's not Bamber.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
83% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Corrolary: if it's accurate, it's coincidence.
This sig no verb.
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
Before everyone goes on a rant about how this is Minority Report or how it's useless to suggest crime happens in poor neighborhoods (duh!) remember what this tool will most likely be used for: placing officers where they will do the most good.
It isn't a presumption of guilt, or arrest before a crime is attempted (minority report). This will be used to determine how many beat officers are needed to reduce crime in an area and if they are in fact reducing the amount of crime.
Of course you can use statistics to prove anything, 75% of everyone knows that.
Does this sound to anyone else like the beginning of psychohistory?
It's a neat idea, but it seems like the complex and chaotic nature of the neighborhood would preclude anyone from being able to draw any substantive conclusion. I mean, if we can't get the weather right within 80% more than 12 hours in advance, we should we be able to predict the behavior of humans, even in large groups?
Easy. The top four, at least:
1. Speeding
2. Rolling stops
3. Sodomy
4. Jaywalking
They're going to have to apply some scoring other than frequency to make this useful.
So, if I want to stage a robbery, now I should find out where the least likely spots are for said robbery, demographically (do they have to publicize the specific information they gather? Civil liberties advocates would probably push it)--and then commit crime where they expect it least. Such a system, if acted upon in the manner suggested, would allow an informed criminal (or gang of criminals!) to act with even less resistance than before. That's the major flaw with demographic information, of course; it only gives averages and likely outcomes. But "they" (local police forces who use this information) will have to be careful in how they use it, because an overreliance on statistics means that the outlier criminal could take away someone's life or property with little chance of being caught.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
And just think, as criminals get more sophisticated, the models will begin to fail, and it's back to "zone coverage".
I can imagine this getting into macrocycles as demand pushes more technology, which is then picked up on and counteracted by criminals "in the know".
Right now, we're lucky that most criminals are not uber-hackers who can break into police databases to get datasets to run through the models they leeched off University FTP sites.
But that's not to say that it couldn't be done by a third part. Contractors who can't find work might start looking for a quick buck...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I have a hard time believing that they can predict the liklihood that there will be a mugging on a given block with more accuracy than the liklihood that it will rain on the same block.
this money would be better spent on social programs which could educate or reduce poverty... but it's so much more fun to just arrest people and put them to death, i guess.
"Life is great; without it, you'd be dead." -Harmony Korine
"this money would be better spent on social programs which could educate or reduce poverty"
That's it, just waste more government money on things, whether or not it works (such as the increasing funding on education that gets less and less results, due to the greedy teachers' union which opposes reforms and takes the money), or "Welfare" programs that teach people not to work and instead laze on the government hammock.
"but it's so much more fun to just arrest people and put them to death, i guess."
Well it is their choice to commit the crimes....
Isn't that right, Mr. Anderton?
"Heisenburglary"
Does that mean if you are observing the crime, then you are committing it yourself?
That word you coined does sound like something involving a McDonald's mascot.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I predict that in the next few moments, an incident of copyright infringement will occur.
*waits*
*click*
*clickyclick*
Looks like I was right.
I also predict that a few marijuana-related laws will be broken this evening.
Damn, I'm GOOD!
Only a TERRORIST would know the address of the White House. Perhaps you need to be deported under the PATRIOT Act
After all, the 9/11 hijackers were all well-off and well-financed. None of them had experienced one day of true poverty their whole lives.
"After all, the 9/11 hijackers were all well-off and well-financed. None of them had experienced one day of true poverty their whole lives."
It's not poverty that causes it. It arises from a state of reprehensible character (being mean and greedy).
Ok, try it. I'm guessing the least like place for a robbery would be about 6 miles under the ocean (near the Mariana Trench, but about 3/4 of a mile from the bottom). Now, remember, you can only rob people -- stealing stuff from buildings and vaults is called burglary. My next least-likely place would be in geostationary orbit around the moon. I'll pay your bail if you get caught.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
we can't get the weather right within 80% more than 12 hours in advance
This is true, because as you point out weather is a chaotic system. But nevertheless, we can predict certain global outcomes like the annual rainfall in Sweden or the average summer temperature in LA with quite good accuracy.
Similarly, we will probably never be able get the number of crimes within the next 12 hours right within 80%. But the number of crimes within the next month is another matter.
And this can be quite useful in considering different social policies or sending patrol cars to the right places.
Tor
Preliminary data reveals that carjackings correlate to the number of copies of GTA that have been sold in the immediate area. From now on, your license will automatically be suspended when you buy GTA.
Officials are also considering legislation to classify "The Sims" as an addictive substance.
Ron Paul 2012
When in doubt, predict that the trend will continue.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... will cause the pattern to change. Then the trick will be to predict how the pattern will change when you act on your present information. Then you start acting to change the pattern to best match your resources ... and then a politician with a "cause" lobbies for action to increase the amount of crime he/she wants to be seen fighting ... and everyone makes lots of money ... and that's a good thing.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
I think they serve cat burgers at White Castle.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
True. Here in the U.S., the government doesn't publish jurisdictional correlations between crime victimization rates and economic numbers like residential and commercial real estate values, and total household employment (nonfarm and farm, payroll and self-employment.) Between those three values, there are three correlations, and six possible arrows of causation. Some of the data are recorded by census tract, and some are recorded by precinct. It should be easy to convert such measures to counties, but it is not always easy.
However, it seems that many officials do have an intuitive sense that when the crime rate goes up, property values go down, and when jobs are created, then property values go up and crime goes down. Therefore, creating jobs with education is nearly universally superior to creating jobs with war (e.g., "security" jobs != job security.) There are a lot of officials who still don't understand that, many of whom are corrupt, but most of whom are simply ignorant.
It would help if they would stop using the "unemployment rate" when they would be better off with the "job creation rate." Nobody knows what the optimal unemployment rate is, but everyone wants the number of employed people to increase, primarily because that's the only way we can pay for all the unemployable people.
It would also help if they would stop using "flat tax" when they mean "progressive taxation." Keeping the high tax brackets from allowing the middle class to shrink is perhaps the most important of all, since class warfare is so evil.
Another thing that would help would be to stop laying off teachers. Anyone who wants a military much larger than they think it really should be, should really look again at the lines of causation.
Nobody ever said life would be a cakewalk. However, with excellent math there will always be a way.
Best wishes.
According to the article, they seem to be grasping at straws:
They are apparently matching coincidental data with crime statistics rather than finding causal relationships. By this I mean they can correlate such weird things as percentage of dirt versus grass in yards, average number of health club memberships, and population density to crime rates, but that doesn't mean they have a reliable means to accurately predict crimes.
Further, finding causal relationships in a system as complex as human social interaction is impossible. A simple example is the relationship that poverty causes robberies.
The first flaw is that there are numerous counter examples, both where impoverished individuals do not rob, and where non-poor people do rob (how many pens do you have from work at home, thief?) ... for the causality to be true, there should be a somewhat proportional relationship (how can it be that the richest people *cough*Enron*cough* still rob?)
Second, and more importantly, is that this is a correlation--if you can find a statistic that correlates poverty to higher crime rates, this does not show that one causes the other--is it the crime that causes the poverty or the poverty that causes the crimes? You can find more obtuse correlations ... oh, I don't know, how about that there are more crimes committed where there is street lighting. A causal relationship would say that removing the street lighting would reduce the crime, but that seems kinda silly.
Anyway, I went around the block just to say that a fair predictive system should deal only with causal relationships to ensure long-term accuracy. I'm sure an impartial computer analysis would find that high crime areas also have a lot of police patrols ... coincidence?
--- Jason Olshefsky
Karma: Poser (mostly affected by adding this line long after everyone else did)
its call conspiracy..... True conspiracies are almost never suspected Suspected conspriacies are almost never true
I don't quite call a 20 percent error area an accurate prediction... That's just luck :)
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
How often have you read about some felon who got caught because he committed a traffic infraction in front of a police officer? Or was rooting through garbage?
The system catches crooks who are dumb, unlucky, sold out by partners, or just really blatant.
The intersection of smart people with criminals is out stealing expensive art, or more likely wearing suits and committing white-collar crimes.
by neighborhoods.
Everyone knows the jiggaboos go bongoid when the sun goes down.
Just napalm the ghettos, nationwide, and prevent hundreds of thousands of crimes before the fact.