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Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes
An anonymous reader writes: Using profiling algorithms, police are tracking suspected criminals to prevent them from committing predicted crimes. We're one step from locking people up for what they might do. The New York Times reports: "The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime “hot spots” and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify “hot people” and aid the authorities in forecasting crime."
I've already seen this movie, And I think its a tv series now too.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority_Report_(TV_series)
GUILTY! Instant Death Penalty!
*muffled Grand Jury applauding in the distance*
I cannot see anything that could possibly go wrong with this idea, except for everything.
Can't wait until it's hacked and they start arresting the police chief, the city council, and everyone with a zip code that begins with a letter or a number.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
To quote Eddie Izzard, himself paraphrasing someone else:
(running to one side of the stage)
"I've got a new idea, I've got a new idea..."
(turning, and running away in the other direction)
"IT'S THE SAME IDEA! IT'S THE SAME IDEA!"
The ability to predict crime has been the holy grail of law enforcement for over a century now. They've tried psychology, sociology, biology...even phrenology...to try and point the finger at people and say "Yep, that guy's gonna commit some crime; let's harass the living fuck out of him so we catch him when he does!" What none of these attempts ever, ever seem to try and ponder is the base rate (most people aren't criminals), it's relevance to statistical probability (it means that you're looking for a needle in the haystack even if you make the haystack smaller), and the impact of false positives (which means you're going to piss off a shitload of people unless your method is impossibly accurate). And until they can account for and address those three factors, I think that any attempts at achieving this goal are entirely doomed.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Okay, folks, it is time to get rid of the political correctness and call a spade a spade.
There is one group of Americans who cause the vast majority of violent crimes in the United States. They commit a disproportionately large amount of homicides and make up a vastly disproportionate amount of the people in prisons across the country.
They are responsible for being a majority of drug offenders. They cause most fights in schools and make up the vast, vast majority of high school drop outs.
They are also responsible for a vastly disproportionate amount of DUIs.
But political correctness will not allow us to talk about this problem. If we simply locked up this part of society, we'd all be better off.
And I think we all know what group this is.
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Males. Lock 'em all up and throw away the key.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Their tool only works (if at all) on certain categories of crime. It misses huge ones, particularly those in which the people in power engage:
* CIA torture.
* CIA, NSA, FBI, and police violations of the Constitution.
* CIA perjury to Congress.
* Bank executives' racketeering in regards to mortgage origination.
I'd pay good money for a tool to detect those kinds of crimes, and to see them properly prosecuted.
While I would probably think this is a "bad thing" in it's current form, I think there is a value to identifying people who struggle with urges to rape, assault, kill, etc and getting them the help they need pro-actively. If they haven't committed any crime that we know of, they should be considered innocent and treated as such, but they might be receptive to programs that would help them to work through their issues without violence.
Coding Blog
I have no problem with monitoring parolees, that's part of the bargain. Wearing a tracking device to get out of jail early, submit to drug testing, etc. However, tracking people who have not committed any crime is a different story. Here's a scenario, a 'clean record' man loses his wife due to a drunk driver. He buys a gun and starts hanging out near the defendant (all realistically trackable by an algorithm collecting records & gps data), what is an appropriate response, if any?
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
I think this sounds like a wonderful idea. I propose as a test that we use it on police departments to try and determine those officers that are most likely to abuse citizens. If it is successful in dropping those number significantly then we can talk about maybe trying it out on citizens.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
If you've committed a crime, it's more likely that you, rather than someone who has never committed a crime, will commit the next crime. The term is "recidivism."
If you've never committed a crime, I think it's about a 3% chance you'll commit a serious one. (http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet) However, if you have committed a serious crime, you'll about 40% likely to commit another serious one within 3 years. (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/09/recidivism_and_mental_illness_iowa_s_central_pharmacy_pilot_project_is_an.html)
This is good news for those profiting from the privatized Correctional system.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
What's the chances that they do something that benefits the would be criminal to keep him from committing the crime?
In this comment. Just wait until Watson is thrown into the prediction mix...
people spy on each other and report their neighbor, police spy on everyone: Soviet Union, Nazi Germany etc.
USA is following a well worn path
The self-fulfilling prophecy would require the person to make the prediction about them self or have someone tell them of the prediction. It doesn't work if the police make the prediction and don't tell you about it.
Lets just cut the bullshit. Here we go, when a white male turns 18 he gets randomly sentenced from 10 to 20 years in prison. A black male gets 20 to 40 years and a Hispanic male gets 20 to 50.
A women will get a random sentence from 5 to 10 years regardless of race.
There that should do it. I think I covered police prejudices in my assessment quite nicely. Address all present and future crimes all in one setting
if that doesn't work lets just send the police out to collect any random person they want for any reason. Drag them before a judge and lets just let the judge roll dice to determine jail time. or spin some big ass wheel like wheel of fortune.
Oh I like this too. Lets just let the police shoot any random black male once a month during every month with an R in it. Beat a few homeless for sport, and pepper spray any student gathering bigger than 1.
fuck justice and this innocent till proven guilty bullshit , rights. what rights? every is guilty of something. Lets just cut the middleman and all those expensive trials and go right to punishment phase.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Just because somebody might commit a crime can't justify police harassment. Unless one has a articulated suspicion of a crime that is about to happen the police should not be questioning people. "gut" feelings because someone is black, young, out at 3AM, or similar isn't articulated suspicion. There are just as many people if not more people not committing crimes. That's "gut", not articulated suspicion. If the police pass someone carrying a gun, pointing it at someone, and screaming "I'm going to kill you", that is articulated suspicion. You don't know that the person is going to kill someone, but it's highly likely given the combination of factors, and you can predict *what* the person is going to do next with a high degree of certainty. You can't articulate what a person walking at 3AM is going to do next because it's more likely they're *not* committing (statistically) a crime and not about to commit a crime. Simply saying there is a high chance is a gut feeling feeling and is not articulated suspicion.
I predict that the police will abuse this.
perhaps they should use this tech on their own selves first.
IF (black) AND IF (shitty_neighborhood) AND IF (gold_crowns)
THEN criminal = true
ELSE
criminal = false
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
If you catch them before they commit a crime based on a so-called prediction they would commit a crime, then they won't be able to commit the crime, which suggests that the prediction is invariably fallible. Either you predict that someone will commit a crime and stop them before they do making the prediction wrong, or else you fail to predict that someone will commit a crime in the first place. In both cases, the mechanism for predicting crimes fails unless it is not used to stop the crime from occurring (which is pointless, obviously).
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
In the US, crime has become pretty much arbitrary in definition and enforcement. So this will be very bad, and it will breed massive crimes.
AC isn't just joking. You can pretty much bag people arbitrarily, even before adding this system's scrutiny. I hope the internet has memorized Richeliu's quote by now?
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
http://www.threefeloniesaday.c...
So I expected the banal comments, but how can this be used positively?
My Devils' Advocate attempt: If you can ID a person who is likely on the path to crime, would it not be good to help them change their path?
How about a tool to predict which officers are most likely to commit unjustified shootings of civilians?
Then we can fire them pre-emptively BEFORE they murder innocent people!
Use it on the police and politicians. Problem is there will be no one left to run the government.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
So... minor offenses that good white people can get away with will now be persecuted (with zeal) against minorities mostly. Nothing there that will inflame some community like Ferguson or Baltimore.
Letter To Iran
What a lot of words to say "we're going to continue harassing the poor and minorities".
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Sounds like a better off ted episode.
Better Off Ted: Season 1, Episode 4
"Veridian comes up with an extremely insensitive solution to a problem with its motion sensors that do not detect black people"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt13...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Stop using "social" media, all of it.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
In the article one of the critics describes the general approach as:
âoeBecause you live in a certain neighborhood or hang out with certain people, we are now going to be suspicious of you"
So it's suspicion based on who you associate with. If you hang out with gang members, you might act like a gang member.
Notice you called it "NSA, CIA, and FBI violations of the Constitution ". You didn't ascribe those crimes to isolated individuals. Instead, you're suggesting that many people involved the NSA have done wrong, THEREFORE other people involved with NSA are likely to do the same kinds of things. That's exactly the same approach they are using.
Because we know that some NSA leadership has violated our rights, we should keep a close eye on any new NSA leadership, because they might also violate our rights. It works. And it's common sense.
Great, now fetuses will also be aborted to prevent future crime or might as well lock up the parents for future parenting a criminal.
to stop crime or create surveillance state ?
From TFA:
"The goal is to do all they can to prevent the crime from happening."
How can you know if you have succeeded? How do you know what would have happened if you hadn't done something? Unfortunately, reality does not have a control group.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
unless somebody can show they got drunk against their will
Yeah, it's not like the majority of drivers have a yeast infection in the stomach. A Texas man blew an estimated 0.37% BAC in the ER after not having had a sip of alcoholic beverage.
In other words, poor schoolchildren are committing a crime because they're not old enough to have graduated from high school, nor have their classmates.
No, the term is "Puritanism", meaning once a criminal, always a criminal (especially if you ain't UMC white), with ZERO chance of going straight as the entire society is arrayed against you. You can't live (rentals only) in vast swaths of the country because you will only be ever hired (if at all) at the worst, lowest type of jobs reserved for the Untouchables, and you can't even vote again, FFS!
'Going Straight' is a punchline to a cruel joke, given that in the US, you're literally worth more to the Prison-Industrial complex when you're locked up rather than 'free'. It's a fait accompli as just like the Scarlett Letter, most of this country still gets a secret near-sexual thrill from 'moralistically' brutalizing other people.
Now where's the profit in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You look at the way our government runs and still say it like it would be a bad thing?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
//Algorythm
if not race="caucasian"
possible_perp=true
endif
There's also step 2.5 to be taken into consideration.
Step 2.5: Upon release, try to make a living without committing any crimes, realize that basic survival via legal employment is even further out of reach for a convicted felon than it is for a normal denizen of your already precarious economic background.
I expect to see police arrests of CEOs and execs any second now. .... (waits) ....
Oh, so you don't mean "most crime", just excuses to get underpaid prison labor in slave states?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think you mean Moon City
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It would benefit society, yes. It would however NOT benefit the LEO and Incarceration businesses.
If they're a drug user, poor, or black they're multiple times more likely to commit a crime. Unfortunately you can't live in reality or use math if you're a cop. You have to pretend everyone is equal and waste time and resources accordingly.
> As what was done was deemed legal
Actually it was ruled ILLEGAL.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/07/...
The ruling came a month before the Patriot Act was set to expire anyway, so the court chose to delay enforcement of the ruling while Congress decided what, if any, surveillance to authorize in some new law. In other words, the court could have said:
"That's illegal. You must stop, and here are the details of what you must do and what you must not do ... You have 30 days to comply."
Instead, the court ruled:
"That's illegal. You must stop. Congress is busy working out the details right now, and that'll be done within 30 days anyway."
The snooping which the court ruled was not authorized under the Patriot Act ended for a few hours when P. Act expired on a Tuesday morning. Later that day, Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which said the NSA can't store the records, the phone companies must store them and respond to specific queries from the NSA.
Incarceration business? Perhaps not.
However, I don't see how this affects the cops. Someone still has to act on the information. Presumably that will be law enforcement agents. Perhaps not ones with weapons or hand-cuffs, but you wouldn't necessarily spend less money on a program like this.
Crime and poverty go hand in hand. Usually poverty occurs among minorities more than upon the majority race. Better said crime that is easy to detect is common among minorities. Crimes behind mansion walls are normally not in the eye of cops. Predictive policing can be as simple as recording what area has the most incidents at a certain time of day and then putting extra cops at that location at that time of day. The effect can be racist simply because cops are evaluated from the number of arrests they make. Is it better to assign much more police effort to white collar crime or to arrest 1,000 people trying to buy crack or carrying an illegal weapon? I suspect that to prevent social chaos that it would be far better to assign a lot of police effort to the types of crimes normally committed by businesses such as falsely labeling workers as independent contractors and thus raising money from penalties rather than spending money locking up people for carrying a knife which may well be needed to survive in some neighborhoods.
You've cited three cases, none of which support your claim.
One ruling that those specific plaintiffs hadn't shown standing to sue. That case didn't reach the legality of the program- the discussion didn't that far.
Another citation you provided was what I mentioned- the court declined a motion for an order of the court ordering changes to the program because Congress was voting on those details. The court didn't say it was okay, the court said the judge didn't need to determine the details of how to fix because Congress was busy doing that already.
Lastly, Pauley was overruled by the appeals court after his 2013 decision in trial court. That case didn't end up ruling that it was legal, in the end.
You're right that SCOTUS will probably end up ruling on the new program.
Is it better to assign much more police effort to white collar crime or to arrest 1,000 people trying to buy crack or carrying an illegal weapon?
The police and the DA will always go after low hanging fruit as this makes them look good when they tout statistics on how "tough on crime" they are.
We need to start sending copies of the U.S. Constitution out. It seem our lawmaker don't know a f'ing thing about it.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
California (or at least in LA county) already has increased penalties for criminal association (ie, gang membership). This isn't RICO-type penalties. These don't criminalize advise-and/or-coordination of criminal activities. They simply add jail time, if convicted, to acts already recognized as criminal acts. In other words, having friends who are gang members could potentially be used against a person to increase their penalty (years in jail) for non-coordinated criminal activity. This is not in Texas. This is in the "liberal" LA.
I am not a lawyer, but I am paraphrasing anecdotal story told my by a lawyer (practicing in LA). The key is that because gang "affiliation" is difficult to prove because gang members might be to scared to testify against other gang members, gang "association" (being seen together with a known gang members during non-criminal acts) is enough to imply that a person is a more hardened criminal.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
No, it should be Psycho-Pass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
They are measuring (poorly) people's Crime Coefficient to focus on the potential criminals.
Oliver.
So lets create some algorithms to watch the police. Where and when they are most likely to be and all that stuff. I'm willing to bet that if the police force starts to use such algorithms on a regular basis some bad guys will find ways to exploit that.
Either way I don't think I'd mind being identified as a "hot person".
I can predict crimes too. Anyone can. Just watch a politician. Sooner or later they'll commit a crime.
There's a lot of milage in engaging those most likely to commit crime and leading them away from that path.
The US fixation on "revenge" rather than "justice" is rather worrying.
Don't worry about rise of The Machines because we will be all gone before they even appear.
I think you are exactly right and wish I had some mod points for this comment.
You trust the police and legal system far too much.