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."
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...
I'm more afraid this will lead to another push to get profiling legitimized. Not even racially but by where you live within your city.
Imagine handing a cop your license and having them come back to the car asking to search your car because you live in an area with a high drug problem rating. After finding nothing the officer would thank you and if suspicious enough may follow you for a little while 'just in case'.
Granted the ability to stop some crimes before they happen would be of incredible benifit to society as whole. The potential for abuse is there as well though.
To strive, to seek, but not to yield
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.
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
The problem is not so much profiling as it is stopping short of full intelligent analysis of the profiling data.
Coming to the conclusion that "black skin causes criminals" is as short sighted as coming to the conclusion that "nicotine stains between the fingers causes lung cancer".
There are deeper root causes that people don't want to examine because it could upset their convenient view of the world and/or cost them time and money to solve properly.
Unfortunately, it's politically convenient to sit patly on the shallow analysis and to offer similarly shallow solutions, like the heavy-handed approach you mention.
It's the solution of bureaucracy: since 1% of the people do wrong, we'll impose an onerous burden on ten times as many people, and probably only be 30% successfully in stopping the 1% bad element.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Isn't that right, Mr. Anderton?
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
I don't know about that.
Lots of variables in weather.
Humans - fear, greed, envy and lust about sums it up
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
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.