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Police To Test App That Assesses Suspects (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Police in Durham are preparing to go live with an artificial intelligence (AI) system designed to help officers decide whether or not a suspect should be kept in custody, BBC is reporting. The system classifies suspects at a low, medium or high risk of offending and has been tested by the force. It has been trained on five years' of offending histories data. One expert said the tool could be useful, but the risk that it could skew decisions should be carefully assessed. Data for the Harm Assessment Risk Tool (Hart) was taken from Durham police records between 2008 and 2012. The system was then tested during 2013, and the results -- showing whether suspects did in fact offend or not -- were monitored over the following two years. Forecasts that a suspect was low risk turned out to be accurate 98% of the time, while forecasts that they were high risk were accurate 88% of the time.
It's not Durham NC, it's Durham UK. So it's more likely to be the other way round.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The cops aren't doing the profiling, the app is. Nice.
Wonderful, more people get to find out that neural networks are a great way of coming to the same conclusion that any normal adult human could have come up with - after being woken up in the middle of the night after a evening of hard drinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Okay it's not quite AI assessing of a subject but can this type of AI assist be far behind?)
How to avoid the grievance mongers; only apply it to whites.
Are we gonna replace Judge Judy with an app?
This might be a non sequiteur, but I'd love a gps with Judhe Judy's mildly irritated voice.
It almost sounds to me like it was 100% accurate - if 2% of those deemed low risk of offending again then went and broke the law again, isn't that ... well, the definition of low risk? Same for the high risk result - if I understand it correctly, only 12% of those didn't break the law again.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
They've got Mr. T on Waze right now.
"Turn left FOO!"
(really)
I could see Judge Judy next.
Here we go. Easy is a four letter word folks. Dollar signs once again outweigh society. I'm glad I am past my prime and worry for the kids left behind.
"Hi god. I'll be good, I promise."
"I'll be the judge of that!"
Meanwhile most of us are focused on the war with Oceania while more of this type of stuff comes into being.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
It just has to outperform cops.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
So if (or when) this tool "decides" it is safe to release a suspect, who then goes on to commit another crime after release, who is reprimanded? who carries the can? who pays?
Ultimately the responsibility still lies with the police force. It is their tool, the public safety is their responsibility.There needs to be reinforcement of this at every level, so that nobody can shrug their shoulders and say "the computer said it was OK".
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Does this mean it would be possible to write a counter-app? I mean an app that tells you what to wear, what to say and how to behave such that the police app will judge you as "low risk"?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
If the AI starts to evaluate, based SOLEY on data, that a particular racial group *does* tend to re-offend more often and is hence a higher risk....do we as the public start to believe it, or do we say that AI, even though purely scientific and logic based, is not Politically Correct and must have some artificial weights put into the algorithm to keep it from finding that some racial or economic strata of folks are more high risk and should be kept in jail?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
You're assuming the data is unbiased - one of the known issues with systems like this is that biased policing can lead to datasets that don't reflect reality. A common example is how every other piece of data we have suggests that all racial and economic groups use illegal drugs at similar levels, but when you feed drug arrest records into predictive systems, they tell you lower income minority neighborhoods should be targeted. Which, logically, results in an even higher rate of arrest in those neighborhoods, but means there's even fewer police resources looking at other areas, potentially depressing arrests. And when you feed THAT data back in, it reinforces the same patterns.
Existing police biases generate the data you're feeding into the system. Bias in, Bias out. It's not like this is a new idea.
Ok, then don't use it for victimless crimes.
I don't care who uses what drug....if they wanna kill themselves, that's their option.
But hard to bias against who is committing the most gun violence, home invasions, rapes, violent crimes that actually impact those of us in regular society.
I think its pretty hard to bias those....so, why not let the results fall where they may, whatever they may be.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Not to throw you reasoning askew, but could this be because the drug use is ancillary. Consider that police may not get calls for fights, break-ins, etc in higher income neighborhoods, so they have fewer reason to be patrolling those areas. The residents of higher income neighborhoods would be less likely to parade around the neighborhood with their drugs. That is, while they are using the drugs, they are not making themselves a public nuisance, let alone a public safety issue.
If the point of the police is to insure public safety, instead of enforcing arbitrary laws, if follows that the reinforcing data you point out would actually still work toward the ultimate goal.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
How UK police work but in the U.S. all the cops have is charge data.
So 12% that were judged high risk were in fact not.
"It is better 100 guilty Persons should escape than that one innocent Person should suffer." - Benjamin Franklin
Of course, this is the British we are talking about now. Blackstone put that error rate at around 1 in 10. So this app is statistically close enough for them.
Have gnu, will travel.
I thought the idea was to detain people if they had already committed a crime, so I'm a little disturbed at the idea of holding them because you think they are likely to offend in future. If we are going to change the way we do these things, we will need to revamp our entire legal system (which I think would be a terrible mistake).
Any classification system requires unbiased true input to train against.
Here's the model: Black people commit offenses and get arrested; white people are sometimes arrested but are much more likely to be let off with a warning. If the system has any proxy for 'black' in it's inputs, it will train on that. And as we know, there can be MANY such proxies.
Retraining doesn't help: it makes the same judgement call as the officers, and there's not unbiased sample to test against.
Math can't get you away from bias unless you can test the bias.
This sounds like one of those bullshit psychometric job interview tests. Its funny how society offloads the burden of reasoning onto popcorn science (psychometric job interview tests and this app for example) but ignores more rigorous science like what is happening to our planet (not perfect, and somewhat still subjective, but the majority of non-shill scientists agree). We are doomed as a species, maybe not in our lifetime but somewhere down the line for sure.
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
Well, I see things are developing about how I expected: not only is so-called 'AI' making us lazy and less skilled, now it's going to make us dumber and less capable of thinking for ourselves. I see nothing good coming from this, it'll let dangerous people go and lock up people who don't need to be locked up. What's next, some hackneyed 'AI app' to decide whether to shoot someone or not? GTFO with this nonsense.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Precog system came earlier than I expected...
Actually that brings up a good point.
If the AI starts to evaluate, based SOLEY on data, that a particular racial group *does* tend to re-offend more often and is hence a higher risk....do we as the public start to believe it, or do we say that AI, even though purely scientific and logic based, is not Politically Correct and must have some artificial weights put into the algorithm to keep it from finding that some racial or economic strata of folks are more high risk and should be kept in jail?
Well artificial weights have to be incorporated into the program. We're not talking about strong AI here (Artificial General Intelligence) that can determine things for itself, it has to be given parameters. Race should not be one of those parameters as it's not actually a determiner. Poor white neighbourhoods have the same crime problem as poor black ones.... there's just a greater volume of poor blacks (same for Asians and Hispanics). The RWNJ bogeyman of "Political Correctness" doesn't enter into it, parameters should be selected based on science (criminology and psychology).
In other words, if a program lets a repeat offender out because he's white, the program is broken.
If we do develop AGI and it turns out to be racist, humanity will have far bigger problems than a few people wrongfully kept in lockup.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
With todays sensitivity towards political correctness, prove to be unacceptable, EVEN if the AI is looked at and shown to be un-biased and just comes with this on observation.
I"m guessing they'll be using parameters like sex....if that is the case, why not race?
Is there really a legitimate reason, if the play field starts 100% fair and observation points to race being a factor observed...that is shouldn't be considered in the decision making process for "risk" of re-offense in this case?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Race should not be one of those parameters as it's not actually a determiner. Poor white neighbourhoods have the same crime problem as poor black ones.... there's just a greater volume of poor blacks (same for Asians and Hispanics).
If that's true, then the algorithm should assign race a weight of zero, assuming that the other relevant factors are used as parameters. Whether or not it should be included is a matter of political correctness, not racial bias.
...parameters should be selected based on science (criminology and psychology).
Why limit your parameter choice to what's suggested by criminology & psychology? Wouldn't science dictate that you use all useful data?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"But hard to bias against who is committing the most gun violence, home invasions, rapes, violent crimes that actually impact those of us in regular society."
Still biased. Your list is avoiding violence and crimes from the higher classes.
I think the point was that even when police catch upper classes with illegal drugs they tend to be much more lenient.
Also of course, the bigger your property the less likely the police will become aware of a crime happening on it (and even if they do become aware they will tend to be more lenient).
Err...exactly how is that?
Are you saying that in higher classes, if they find dead bodies, they don't investigate and don't find and try to convict people of murder?
I would posit higher class violence crimes would be taken into consideration just like lower class violent crimes. I would guess, however, you'd see less of it in higher classes, but that's just purely my observation.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"gun violence, home invasions, rapes, violent crimes"
Home invasions, gun violence or violent crimes, and I'm guessing rapes, tend to be more common in lower classes, on the other hand higher class crimes tend to be more dependent on capital expenditures.
"If the AI starts to evaluate, based SOLEY on data"
And the legal system is more lenient on higher classes, in general even for non victimless crimes. In other words the data is systemically biased, so the evaluation will be too.
See my reply here:
https://slashdot.org/comments....