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Police Data-Mining Done Right
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.'"
"I'm losing my nerve," Benny said mournfully. "Six times this past year we've flicked into flash crowds, and three times I threw away everything I had because it looked like the cops had time to put us under riot control. Once I was right. Twice I was wrong. That's just not good enough." He braced himself. "I think I'll quit." There, he'd said it.
A hole in space. Larry Niven.
Are the police going to share the location information?
I might want to watch. Cops live!
liqbase
Do they really need to spend thousands of dollars analyzing data to determine there's more crime around check-cashing stores on paydays?
I don't really tend to think in terms of the police having the job of preventing crime. I think there job should be to apprehend criminals who are involved in or have committed a crime. That said, I guess it is good if they have tools that better help them to schedule and plan enforcement. Like anything, it can be taken too far. I would think that what would separate 'good' data mining from 'bad' data mining would be transparency and over site in the process.
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.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The city that won the business intelligence award for data mining is Richmond VA, not 'Redmond'.
Chip H.
How long till it catches on with the criminals?
Some people don't go to places at peak time to avoid queues, if criminals realise the police know the peak times, they can anticipate the strength of guard and where police are?
Knowledge like this can be used to both party's advantages. Some facts are obviously public knowledge such as weather.
I don't think it even takes well-organized crime to understand this.
How about the police force has a counter-itself division? It uses the public knowledge and works independent of the police to outsmart it -- the police can use this knowledge to anticipate counter knowledge usages...
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
you come to one undeniable conclusion:
cop work is one of the most criticized, and yet at the same time vital, aspects of modern life
almost all the comments here have some sort of negative thought or smarmy remark on an aspect of this story. and yet a cop is the first person these same people will call upon and depend upon if they are ever victimized or robbed. and what are the cops doing? no, what are they actually doing? i'm not asking your paranoid distrustful hollywood-addled alter ego, i'm asking your cognitive ability to look at and perceive the reality of actual police work
typical human shortsightedness and lack of gratitude
it must be so thankless being a cop. you're there to protect people, and all they can do is reflexively depart negativity at you
humanity sucks. you are all so ungrateful
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not really. Jail time and such has almost no effect on changing criminal behaviour.
Possibly. Or maybe they are trying to prevent crimes.
The criminals are not worried about going to jail AFTER the crime is committed. But if there is a cop there at the moment they would have committed the crime, most criminals will not commit it.
Means
Motive
Opportunity
With a cop right there, the "opportunity" is removed. So no crime occurs. In general, the crime rate should go down because this isn't something that can easily be displaced. It seems to be tied to the area around a check cashing storefront. Increase the patrols in those areas and the crimes are not committed.
imho
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what exactly does that mean? what are the qualifications in your mind to becoming a cop? i'm going to take a wild guess and say that you would like to see higher standards when hiring cops. ok: now look at the way cops are treated, in your mind, and in the mind of the typical citizen: distrust, fear, hostility
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)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
I almost never called a cop. One time I did because neighbor was making noise after midnight, and nothing happened. The second time I wanted someone to mediate between a tenant and a landlord, they wouldn't do it.
The only cases that I actually talked to a policeman were on the highway, and I had to pay hundreds of dollars and time to show up in traffic court.
Oh, and occasional phone calls to ask for a donation. "No thanks, I've paid my fine share of speeding tickets this year."
So don't lecture us what to think about police. We are taxpayers that pay them to do the work for us. We appreciate what they do but that's still their duty, and we'll not look up to them more than they deserve.
The cops busted him outside a check cashing joint on payday.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Which check-cashing place do you go to?
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
The NYPD's CompStat system 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.
there are silences in your anecdotes that speak volumes
... is? or rather, i just don't think the way you view your place in the events of your life to be very trustworthy. you are editting stuff out
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"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Now for all those computer/techie types, how many bugs or problems/issues seemed remarkably simple after you noticed/fixed them? How many times have you slapped your head and said "geeze, that was really simple."
Sometimes it just helps to have somebody checking up on your work, even if that "somebody" is an automated process or machine.
Where do you people come from? Humanity sucks? People with your shit attitude suck. I scanned the comments, they where a typical mix. I don't love or hate police. I don't like it when they abuse their power (power has that problem) but I know there are plenty of people out there working in law enforcement that do what they do because they care about it. Same as with a lot of other things, but like doctors, paramedics, firefighters and countless other occupations what they do often helps save lives.
Maybe if you could do more then reflexively see the negative part of 'humanity' you could have posted something worth the +5 insightful. All I hear is adolescent clap-trap. Grow up.
Quack, quack.
After you've been robbed if the police don't respond quickly enough simply call back and tell them not to worry about it, you've caught the thieves and you shot them. It's amazing the turnaround time.
The reason is that cops are not allowed to profile ppl. As such, they would get busted. Now, they have proof as to WHY they should be there. Any court is going to say that the police force was simply being stationed where crimes were LIKELY to occur without regard to color, sex, etc. Keep in mind, that most of the check-cashing stores are NOT located at high-end shopping malls. They will be located in down-trodden areas.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
and spend money.
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.
Strategic and tactical placement of resources to maximize effect without resorting to profiling or harassing citizens is a good thing.
What about cops walking a beat? That's right, walking down the same streets over and over everyday. Walking a beat means getting to know the locals and the particulars of a neighborhood in a way that doesn't happen in a squad car. Gangs don't hang out on a corner if once an hour a cops walks by a says hello, but the neighborhood kids still can hangout and could even end up viewing that cop as part of their neighborhood. From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye. You don't have to profile when you actually know the people you see, but if you are just cruising along looking at a sea of nameless faces, then ethnicity and clothing style are about all you have to go on. Profiling is almost inevitable without establishing officers with good personal knowledge/relationship with the locals.
We are all just people.
Many departments don't have quotas on tickets. They by and large don't need to. People violate traffic laws (speeding especially) ALL the time. So all you have to do is get cops that like to write tickets (bastards basically) and set them to work in areas that are a problem. You get loads of tickets.
That's how it works here. You'll essentially never get a ticket for doing less than 10 over (except special cases like school zones and such) and there's no quotas at all. They just put the jerks, the people who will write other cops and even the own family tickets (really) on ticket duty. They have no problem issuing a book or more a day each.
There's not really much reason to whine, either. Yes, the ticket cops are jerks, but if you are going 10 over you can't really say you didn't know.
I wish your comment could get modded higher than 5, you just nailed it. I don't know when it happened, but at some point in time, cops decided that being friendly was not the way to enforce the law but rather to rule with fear. The Denver police chief at one point did not support a policy because it "removed the necessary fear of police." I believe that this has become a serious problem in the US, and is driving a stake between citizens and law enforcement. How many people actually like police officers? I would guess not many. They are not seen as people who are there to protect you, but with the "fear", they are always the bad guys who will arrest you if they so wish.
-AC
From a squad car, no relationship is established and any stationary pack of teens can look like a gang to a biased eye.
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.
Actually, this is him:
"The vast majority of airline stewardesses have treat me rudely. Therefore, most airline stewardesses are rude."
You're the only one with a gross bias.
Grammar Nazi
That sound like a good job? Is the governor mansion in Alaska a nice place to live? Should someone with that kind of job and all the perks be content with life?
Then please tell me why the current senator of Alaska felt it neccesary to commit a crime WHILE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ALL AROUND THE WORLD MAKING A FRACTION OF HIS SALARY, HAVE NOTHING AND NOTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TOO DO NOT COMMIT CRIMES?
Your comment is not just stupid, it is plain insulting.
As if somehow being poor makes you a criminal, yuch. So everybody who comes from a poor background, from a bad neighbourhood and wants more is going to resort to crime while the rich in good areas are offcourse innocent as a newborn kittens.
What you might have meant (unless you truly are a bigot) is that some low value economic crimes might not happen if people weren't forced at times between the choice of paying for basic needs or obeying the law.
These types of crimes are however rare. Even a poor person who robs someone else for a pair of Nikes does NOT qualify, you do NOT need brandname shoes to life. Not even to be "content".
Most crime originates from a sense of entitlement which becomes criminel when society judges that you ain't entitled to it. You are NOT entitled to my paycheck (well unless you happen to be Mrs. SmallFurryCreature), you are NOT entitled to have sex with me if I say no (anyone?), you are NOT entitled to have another million dollars in your bank account by pandering to the needs of big business, etc etc.
At most society can give its citizens a basic income (job? What about those to young, to old or sick to work?) enough to meet their most basic needs. Society can NOT make all its people content.
Either you are a hatefull bigot who really thinks that all poor people are criminals and rich people are innocent, OR you expressed yourselve extremely poorly (even by slashdot standards) or you are just a plain fucking idiot.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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.
Wow. Over here, companies use direct bank transfers to pay their workers' salaries, and have done so for at least 30 years now. I've no need to ever carry large amounts of cash or cash-analogue paper (checks).
Is the US banking industry really that backward? How come?
I really liked Jello Biafra's notion that communities could vote for the policemen who would walk their beat. In a country like the US with such a low voter participation rate, I don't think it could really work though.