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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."
Was the banning of tetraethyl lead in gasoline. Since then crime stats have gotten better and better.
What might work in high-density cities in similar to what you see in Japanese cities - small police offices on corners within a certain spread of city blocks, so there's at least one officer on call for any given neighborhood. I live by a police substation in my city, and I can attest that it has made me more diligent about avoiding minor traffic offenses, and it likely helps their response time (I live in what is admittedly not a very good neighborhood).
This is the DA not the police. So it's more "Look's like you've been in prison before, you've been arrested for serious crime again, and the police say you you've been causing trouble in the neighborhood, let's allocate more resources to prosecute this case." I can see an argument for filtering the input for possible bias from police, but that's supposedly the DA's job already.
I see on slashdot all the time about going back to doing honest detective work where you find out who is really causing trouble in the neighborhood rather throwing out a monitoring dragnet or throwing absurd punishments rather than trying to aim for reforming the person. I have a hard time complaining about this as long as there is monitoring that data is fair and collected/retained in an appropriate manner.
Why wouldn't you put additional resources to stopping an Al Capone over some kid who got caught as a rumrunner. Sounds like they are trying to apply common sense with collected data.
Hmmm...this reminds me of the story about operational analysis of bomber armor in WWII. Briefly, the Allies examined bombers that returned from raids, compiled where they had been hit by flak and machine gun fire, and started a program to armor those spots. Then they realized, that the planes that hadn't returned probably had been damaged in the spots that the returning planes had not been, and that's where the armor was needed. In this case, singling out the people who get arrested over and over, while not a bad idea, is focusing on the incompetent criminals - the people who are good at it will get arrested at much lower rates than the ones who are in and out of the system all the time.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
In my opinion, that "problem" is caused by being stuck in a cycle. People who feel disenfranchised and unfairly profiled are less likely to follow the "rules" of a society they feel rejects them. Why would you want to follow the "rules" made by people you believe hate you?
Thus, they are more likely to commit crimes. (Job candidate profiling also means they are less likely to be employed, meaning they take more risk.) But being more likely to commit crimes means they are profiled even more, creating yet more disenfranchisement, and the cycle drills yet deeper, neither side blinking, and both sides saying, "the other guy should straiten up first, THEN I will straiten up also" = STALEMATE.
Politicians and pundits seem too eager to blame than solve the problem. If you can make a case that it's "the other guy's fault", then you escape "responsibility" to change yourself.
Table-ized A.I.
I used to live in an apartment complex where one of the other buildings had one of it's rooms converted into a mini police station. It eas great! Very quiet, nothing ever happened. The place had a bad past (the reason for the station) and a horrible reputation. we couldn't even get anyone to deliver pizza there! After I was there for a few years the city cut back the police force in order to spend money on it's parks.The mini station was closed. Immediately the car break-ins started! We moved out at the end of that lease. They did make the parks pretty nice though...