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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?)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.