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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.
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?)
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!
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.
Done properly, this could be used as a way to prevent profiling. An algo can only make decisions based on the data provided to it. If race isn't provided as an input, it won't affect the decision. Humans can't make the same claim, as prejudices can sneak into our decisions unconsciously.
There are so many ways that the algorithm can introduce bias, even if race isn't provided as an input, if other factors that may be highly correlated by race are (e.g., home zip code, occupation, income, etc.).
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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).
This would only be valid if Police was actually punished for their mistakes. Most often than not they are not so any computer system which can reduce mistakes even if it is punished for its new mistakes is an improvement.
**Life is too short to be serious**