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'Moneyball' Approach Reduces Crime In New York City
HughPickens.com writes The NYT reports that NY County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr.'s most significant initiative has been to transform, through the use of data, the way district attorneys fight crime. "The question I had when I came in was, Do we sit on our hands waiting for crime to tick up, or can we do something to drive crime lower?" says Vance. "I wanted to develop what I call intelligence-driven prosecution." When Vance became DA in 2009, it was glaringly evident that assistant D.A.s fielding the 105,000-plus cases a year in Manhattan seldom had enough information to make nuanced decisions about bail, charges, pleas or sentences. They were narrowly focused on the facts of cases in front of them, not on the people committing the crimes. They couldn't quickly sort minor delinquents from irredeemably bad apples. They didn't know what havoc defendants might be wreaking in other boroughs.
Vance divided Manhattan's 22 police precincts into five areas and assigned a senior assistant D.A. and an analyst to map the crime in each area. CSU staff members met with patrol officers, detectives and Police Department field intelligence officers and asked police commanders to submit a list of each precinct's 25 worst offenders — so-called crime drivers, whose "incapacitation by the criminal-justice system would have a positive impact on the community's safety." Seeded with these initial cases, the CSU built a searchable database that now includes more than 9,000 chronic offenders (PDF), virtually all of whom have criminal records. A large percentage are recidivists who have been repeatedly convicted of grand larceny, one of the top index crimes in Manhattan, but the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers "uncooperative witnesses," and a fluctuating number of violent "priority targets," which currently stands at 81. "These are people we want to know about if they are arrested," says Kerry Chicon. "We are constantly adding, deleting, editing and updating the intelligence in the Arrest Alert System. If someone gets out of a gang, or goes to prison for a long time, or moves out of the city or the state, or ages out of being a focus for us, or dies, we edit the system accordingly — we do that all the time."
"It's the 'Moneyball' approach to crime," says Chauncey Parker. "The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you'll find a gang tattoo and if you look you'll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them."
"It's the 'Moneyball' approach to crime," says Chauncey Parker. "The tool is data; the benefit, public safety and justice — whom are we going to put in jail? If you have 10 guys dealing drugs, which one do you focus on? The assistant district attorneys know the rap sheets, they have the police statements like before, but now they know if you lift the left sleeve you'll find a gang tattoo and if you look you'll see a scar where the defendant was once shot in the ankle. Some of the defendants are often surprised we know so much about them."
RTFA
they are using arrest records to determine priority in assigning cases and asking for bail. if you have a dozen arrests expect your case to get more attention than being arrested protesting one time
Actually what reduced the crime was the Cosby Show. Since that show came out crime stats have gotten better and better.
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Hey, don't blame Canada for that ... you guys have been openly ignoring your own Constitution pretty much daily for 13 years. You've probably been quietly ignoring it longer.
Stop and frisk? Border stops within 100 miles of the border? An AG who said Habeus Corpus wasn't a right? Secret courts? Warrantless wiretapping? Blanket surveillance? Parallel construction?
That shit is all on you, and has been publicly supported by your own politicians and much of your citizenry.
If anything, America has been putting on a clinic of how to erode and undermine civil rights, and then exporting that everywhere else.
America ignored her own Constitution on her own terms.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Just wait until you get mugged, little boy.
On that day, profiling just might start to make sense to you.
Political correctness is used by idiots who either refuse to think
for themselves or are unable to think for themselves.
The real world doesn't conform to how people wish it was. The real
world is how it is, and sometimes it's not pretty. Certain classes of
people are much more likely to commit violent crime, and those
of us who have experience "on the street" KNOW THIS IS TRUE.
/
Moneyball is a sports metaphor where you don't get the flashy big-name players that don't really do anything. You get the unknown, overlooked players for cheap that just know how to win. You do this by using different stats than are typically used by most other teams. For instance, the Oakland A's were big on on-base percentage and recently the LA Kings are big into Corsi (shots attempted differences when a player is on the ice, in other words, puck control).
The "Moneyball" aspect of this is that they are turning DA work on its head. Instead of spreading their resources way too thin and throwing huge sentences at minor drug possession, they are giving them minor plea deals and saving the big guns for the people who the communities are reporting are the troublemakers. By taking out the troublemakers, it reduces the pressure on others to join them in crime, so it results in less crime total.
This is fantastic and should be a model for other communities.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Don't get caught?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Well the second paragraph of the summary makes it pretty clear it isn't just a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". They are repeat offenders of serious crimes. I don't really even get what you mean by "biased slice of the population". Yeah it's biased, because they have to include bad guys in the list. Otherwise what do you mean? Data isn't racist, which was my original point. I'm assuming unless they are the most bigotted people on the planet and somehow programmed that into their algorithm, their lists include a pretty fair percentage of each race, according to their relative rates of committing the crimes they are singling out as important.
Well the whole story makes it clear that it is a database of "people who look like they could be criminals". One kid got in because he was wearing a red shirt. They're convicted of trivial crimes, like jaywalking. And a disproportionate number of black people are arrested for jaywalking.
A disproportionate number of black people are also arrested for small-time pot possession charges, after the cops illegally search them, even though the pot usage in NYC is the same for blacks and whites. So if black people and white people use drugs in equal proportions, and the DA prosecutes 10 times as many black people as white for drug offenses, that would make it racist, wouldn't it?
The story also says that they put people in the database, with no chance to defend themselves, based on the claims that those people are "gang members" or "troublemakers," by anonymous informants, who are themselves arrested for small-time crimes. Can you give me a definition of a "gang member" that is consistent with the Bill of Rights?
FTA:
the list also includes active gang members, people whom the D.A. considers “uncooperative witnesses,” and a fluctuating number of violent “priority targets,”
“When prosecutors begin to compile databases and start doing so-called ‘smart prosecutions,’ you have to ask who is getting in the databases, what are the criteria and where are the outside checks?” says Steven Zeidman, director of the criminal-defense clinic at the CUNY School of Law. “More than a thousand people are arrested in N.Y.C. each day, and the overwhelming and disproportionate number of them are people of color arrested for ‘broken windows’ type offenses like riding a bike on the sidewalk or jaywalking. I was in court with a kid arrested for jaywalking; the arresting officer was from the gang unit, and he stopped the kid because he was wearing a red shirt that, according to the police, happened to be a gang color. He wasn’t in a gang, but he’s probably now in a database.”
Actually, what really reduced crime was legalized abortion.
From "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Crime," by John J. Donohue III and Steven D. Levitt, appearing in the The Quarterly Journal of Economics:
If that is correct, still either the Cosby Show or banning leaded gasoline could have accounted for up to a 50% of the drop in crime.
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