Are we as a society being kept from discussing the big issues?
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Now this is very frightening!!!
The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist?
When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, "I haven't done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn't done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.
What McDaniel didn’t know was that he had been placed on the city’s “heat list” — an index of the roughly 400 people in the city of Chicago supposedly most likely to be involved in violent crime. Inspired by a Yale sociologist’s studies and compiled using an algorithm created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the heat list is just one example of the experiments the CPD is conducting as it attempts to push policing into the 21st century.
Predictive analytical systems have been tested by police departments all over the country for years now, but there’s perhaps no urban police force that’s further along — or better funded — than the CPD in its quest to predict crime before it happens. As Commander Jonathan Lewin, who’s in charge of information technology for the CPD, told The Verge: “This [program] will become a national best practice. This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives.”
But the jury’s still out about whether Chicago’s heat list and its other predictive policing experiments are worth the invasions of privacy they might cause and the unfair profiling they could blatantly encourage. As Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Verge: “My fear is that these programs are creating an environment where police can show up at anyone’s door at any time for any reason.”
Beyond ‘hotspots’
In 2009, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) made millions of dollars in grants available for any police department with a burgeoning predictive program. Police all over the country applied to tap into those NIJ dollars. The big winner was Chicago; its combination of headline-making homicide rates and already established data- and tech-focused policing made it a perfect fit. The CPD received more than $2 million to test two phases of its experimental program.
Though it took awhile to get started in earnest (staff turnover and internal politics in 2011 and 2012 stalled the project), last year the CPD’s predictive program picked up steam. One man behind that progress was Miles Wernick.
Wernick is the Motorola professor and director of the Medical Imaging Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. He says he’s been doing predictive analysis work since the 1980s, when he worked with the US military to recognize potential targets in the battlefield. From there he proceeded to medical imaging. A lot of his current work focuses on analysing data and brain scans to make automated diagnoses of dementias in elderly patients — not exactly police work.
"By looking at the whole picture," he says, "you can begin to learn what it means for a certain area to be abnormal."
But he was introduced in 2009 to Commander Lewin, the CPD’s information technology lead, and the two teamed up for the NIJ grant.
The CPD's crime database is extensive. It has plenty of historical crime information — the kind of data that’s been used for years to identify clusters known as "hotspots" where crimes have occurred in the past. But the CPD’s database also includes information about disturbance calls and calls regarding suspicious persons.
Based on that information, Wernick and his team at IIT are working on technology to generate crime maps that highlight neighborhoods of the city that might soon be at risk of an uptick in crime. Wernick compares his team’s work to a weather forecast or a computer-aided diagnosis in medicine. But Wernick is sure not to let his team take all the credit. "The recommendations of the mapping system will not replace the expertise of police officers," he says "but instead highlight potential concerns so that police officers can take them into account."
Wernick compared these predictive maps to identifying potentially worrying anomalies in a mammogram. "By looking at the whole picture," he says, "you can begin to learn what it means for a certain area to be abnormal."
And it was that same approach that helped Wernick give the CPD the statistics it would later use to develop a list of Chicago’s 400 most dangerous people.
"It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot."
Wernick explains that the CPD’s crime database also obviously identifies everyone in the city who’s been arrested for and / or convicted of a crime. Though he wouldn’t share specific details about what went into the algorithms, he says those algorithms are quickly able to narrow down the list of people who "clearly have a high likelihood of being involved in violence." He says it even ranks them according to their chance of becoming involved in a shooting or a homicide.
"It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot," he says. "It has to do with the person’s relationships to other violent people."
This is in line with what Andrew Papachristos, a Yale sociologist and Chicago native, calls a social networking theory. When it comes to violence, Papachristos recently told Chicago Magazine, "It’s not just about your friends and who you’re hanging out with, it’s actually the structure of these networks that matter."
So while Wernick acknowledges that sometimes people such as Robert McDaniel — who haven’t been convicted of a violent crime — may find themselves in the wrong social networks, their presence on the list is not random.
A press liaison for the NIJ explains in an email: "These are persons who the model has determined are those most likely to be involved in a shooting or homicide, with probabilities that are hundreds of times that of an ordinary citizen."
Commander Steven Caluris, who also works on the CPD’s predictive policing program, put it a different way.
"If you end up on that list, there’s a reason you’re there."
Red flags
The CPD’s predictive programs are only in their beginning stages. One source familiar with these programs told The Verge less than 60 of the heat list’s more than 400 people have been personally visited so far. And the NIJ doesn’t anticipate that the CPD’s final report will be published until 2016 — seven years after the initial NIJ grant proposals were submitted. But the programs have certainly raised some red flags in the meantime.
You’re now a marked person
In conversations with The Verge, CPD officials balked at comparisons to the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection program. Their resistance to that comparison is valid. From what the CPD is willing to share, most of the collected information for the heat list is focused on rap sheets — arrest and conviction records. So rather than collecting information on everyone, they’re collecting and using information on people who have had interactions with the police.
Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledges that the idea behind the heat list may be well-intentioned. It’s clear that governments all over the US lock up way too many people — and have done so for decades. Having representatives from a police department visit high-risk people before those individuals have committed a crime is better than the alternative. And heat-list visits could encourage those high-risk people to be on their best behavior. "Any plan that tries to keep prison populations down is good with me," Fakhoury says.
But there are a couple obvious worries here. "First of all, how are we deciding who gets on the list and who decides who gets on the list?" Fakhoury asks. The case of Robert McDaniel worries him. "Are people ending up on this list simply because they live in a crappy part of town and know people who have been troublemakers?" Answers to those questions need to be public, he says.
"We are living in a time when information is easily shareable and easily accessible," Fakhoury says. "So, let’s say we know that someone is connected to another person who was arrested. Or, let’s say we know that someone’s been arrested in the past. Is it fair to take advantage of that information? Are we just perpetuating the problem?" He continues: "How many people of color are on this heat list? Is the list all black kids? Is this list all kids from Chicago’s South Side? If so, are we just closing ourselves off to this small subset of people?"
Are we just perpetuating the problem? Wernick denies that IIT's algorithm uses "any racial, neighborhood, or other such information" to assist in compiling the heat list. The Verge filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CPD to obtain the heat list itself and attempt to use that list as a way to independently answer some of Fakhoury’s questions. The request was denied because sharing that information could "endanger the life or physical safety of law enforcement personnel or any other person," according to a letter from the CPD’s Office of Legal Affairs. The Verge is appealing the decision.
In the meantime, Dr. Wernick assures The Verge that the CPD’s predictive program isn’t taking advantage of — or unfairly profiling — any specific group. "The novelty of our approach," he says, "is that we are attempting to evaluate the risk of violence in an unbiased, quantitative way." He continues: "This is accomplished in a similar manner to how the medical field has identified statistically that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. Of course, everybody who smokes doesn't get lung cancer, but it demonstrably increases the risk dramatically. The same is true of violent crime."
Fakhoury counters: "The worry here is that, if you get picked up for shooting dice and smoking weed, you can be put a list that can be cross referenced. You’re now a marked person for law enforcement. Could that make things worse?"
Though Andrew Papachristos, the Yale sociologist, didn’t help to create the heat list and hasn’t participated in any related visits, his extensive research into Chicago’s crime problems is the basis for much of what the CPD does with predictive analytics. His research has shown, for example, that gun violence spreads similarly to a blood-borne pathogen. People who know each other and hang out in the same circles — people who are a part of the same social network — infect each other with their interests, he found. When those interests include high-risk activities such as carrying a gun or selling drugs, that leads to predictable trouble. He didn’t mention whether any specific groups were likely to be unfairly "marked," per Fakhoury’s suggestion. But he says that "being exposed to violence is an awful thing," and that, "even if [the heat list] doesn't reduce crime, the least it will likely do is diminish the number of people who are exposed to that awful violence."
That’s a best-case scenario, he says.
"If we can divert resources to the right places and proceed automatically to where police and social workers need to be to help people, it would be a fundamental change in the way we approach crime and violence," he says.
"Whether we can actually do that is another question."
Illustrations
The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist?
When the Chicago Police Department sent one of its commanders to Robert McDaniel’s home last summer, the 22-year-old high school dropout was surprised. Though he lived in a neighborhood well-known for bloodshed on its streets, he hadn’t committed a crime or interacted with a police officer recently. And he didn’t have a violent criminal record, nor any gun violations. In August, he incredulously told the Chicago Tribune, "I haven't done nothing that the next kid growing up hadn't done.” Yet, there stood the female police commander at his front door with a stern message: if you commit any crimes, there will be major consequences. We’re watching you.
What McDaniel didn’t know was that he had been placed on the city’s “heat list” — an index of the roughly 400 people in the city of Chicago supposedly most likely to be involved in violent crime. Inspired by a Yale sociologist’s studies and compiled using an algorithm created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the heat list is just one example of the experiments the CPD is conducting as it attempts to push policing into the 21st century.
Predictive analytical systems have been tested by police departments all over the country for years now, but there’s perhaps no urban police force that’s further along — or better funded — than the CPD in its quest to predict crime before it happens. As Commander Jonathan Lewin, who’s in charge of information technology for the CPD, told The Verge: “This [program] will become a national best practice. This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives.”
But the jury’s still out about whether Chicago’s heat list and its other predictive policing experiments are worth the invasions of privacy they might cause and the unfair profiling they could blatantly encourage. As Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Verge: “My fear is that these programs are creating an environment where police can show up at anyone’s door at any time for any reason.”
Beyond ‘hotspots’
In 2009, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) made millions of dollars in grants available for any police department with a burgeoning predictive program. Police all over the country applied to tap into those NIJ dollars. The big winner was Chicago; its combination of headline-making homicide rates and already established data- and tech-focused policing made it a perfect fit. The CPD received more than $2 million to test two phases of its experimental program.
Though it took awhile to get started in earnest (staff turnover and internal politics in 2011 and 2012 stalled the project), last year the CPD’s predictive program picked up steam. One man behind that progress was Miles Wernick.
Wernick is the Motorola professor and director of the Medical Imaging Research Center at Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago. He says he’s been doing predictive analysis work since the 1980s, when he worked with the US military to recognize potential targets in the battlefield. From there he proceeded to medical imaging. A lot of his current work focuses on analysing data and brain scans to make automated diagnoses of dementias in elderly patients — not exactly police work.
"By looking at the whole picture," he says, "you can begin to learn what it means for a certain area to be abnormal."
But he was introduced in 2009 to Commander Lewin, the CPD’s information technology lead, and the two teamed up for the NIJ grant.
The CPD's crime database is extensive. It has plenty of historical crime information — the kind of data that’s been used for years to identify clusters known as "hotspots" where crimes have occurred in the past. But the CPD’s database also includes information about disturbance calls and calls regarding suspicious persons.
Based on that information, Wernick and his team at IIT are working on technology to generate crime maps that highlight neighborhoods of the city that might soon be at risk of an uptick in crime. Wernick compares his team’s work to a weather forecast or a computer-aided diagnosis in medicine. But Wernick is sure not to let his team take all the credit. "The recommendations of the mapping system will not replace the expertise of police officers," he says "but instead highlight potential concerns so that police officers can take them into account."
Wernick compared these predictive maps to identifying potentially worrying anomalies in a mammogram. "By looking at the whole picture," he says, "you can begin to learn what it means for a certain area to be abnormal."
And it was that same approach that helped Wernick give the CPD the statistics it would later use to develop a list of Chicago’s 400 most dangerous people.
"It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot."
Wernick explains that the CPD’s crime database also obviously identifies everyone in the city who’s been arrested for and / or convicted of a crime. Though he wouldn’t share specific details about what went into the algorithms, he says those algorithms are quickly able to narrow down the list of people who "clearly have a high likelihood of being involved in violence." He says it even ranks them according to their chance of becoming involved in a shooting or a homicide.
"It's not just shooting somebody, or being shot," he says. "It has to do with the person’s relationships to other violent people."
This is in line with what Andrew Papachristos, a Yale sociologist and Chicago native, calls a social networking theory. When it comes to violence, Papachristos recently told Chicago Magazine, "It’s not just about your friends and who you’re hanging out with, it’s actually the structure of these networks that matter."
So while Wernick acknowledges that sometimes people such as Robert McDaniel — who haven’t been convicted of a violent crime — may find themselves in the wrong social networks, their presence on the list is not random.
A press liaison for the NIJ explains in an email: "These are persons who the model has determined are those most likely to be involved in a shooting or homicide, with probabilities that are hundreds of times that of an ordinary citizen."
Commander Steven Caluris, who also works on the CPD’s predictive policing program, put it a different way.
"If you end up on that list, there’s a reason you’re there."
Red flags
The CPD’s predictive programs are only in their beginning stages. One source familiar with these programs told The Verge less than 60 of the heat list’s more than 400 people have been personally visited so far. And the NIJ doesn’t anticipate that the CPD’s final report will be published until 2016 — seven years after the initial NIJ grant proposals were submitted. But the programs have certainly raised some red flags in the meantime.
You’re now a marked person
In conversations with The Verge, CPD officials balked at comparisons to the National Security Agency’s bulk data-collection program. Their resistance to that comparison is valid. From what the CPD is willing to share, most of the collected information for the heat list is focused on rap sheets — arrest and conviction records. So rather than collecting information on everyone, they’re collecting and using information on people who have had interactions with the police.
Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, acknowledges that the idea behind the heat list may be well-intentioned. It’s clear that governments all over the US lock up way too many people — and have done so for decades. Having representatives from a police department visit high-risk people before those individuals have committed a crime is better than the alternative. And heat-list visits could encourage those high-risk people to be on their best behavior. "Any plan that tries to keep prison populations down is good with me," Fakhoury says.
But there are a couple obvious worries here. "First of all, how are we deciding who gets on the list and who decides who gets on the list?" Fakhoury asks. The case of Robert McDaniel worries him. "Are people ending up on this list simply because they live in a crappy part of town and know people who have been troublemakers?" Answers to those questions need to be public, he says.
"We are living in a time when information is easily shareable and easily accessible," Fakhoury says. "So, let’s say we know that someone is connected to another person who was arrested. Or, let’s say we know that someone’s been arrested in the past. Is it fair to take advantage of that information? Are we just perpetuating the problem?" He continues: "How many people of color are on this heat list? Is the list all black kids? Is this list all kids from Chicago’s South Side? If so, are we just closing ourselves off to this small subset of people?"
Are we just perpetuating the problem? Wernick denies that IIT's algorithm uses "any racial, neighborhood, or other such information" to assist in compiling the heat list. The Verge filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CPD to obtain the heat list itself and attempt to use that list as a way to independently answer some of Fakhoury’s questions. The request was denied because sharing that information could "endanger the life or physical safety of law enforcement personnel or any other person," according to a letter from the CPD’s Office of Legal Affairs. The Verge is appealing the decision.
In the meantime, Dr. Wernick assures The Verge that the CPD’s predictive program isn’t taking advantage of — or unfairly profiling — any specific group. "The novelty of our approach," he says, "is that we are attempting to evaluate the risk of violence in an unbiased, quantitative way." He continues: "This is accomplished in a similar manner to how the medical field has identified statistically that smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer. Of course, everybody who smokes doesn't get lung cancer, but it demonstrably increases the risk dramatically. The same is true of violent crime."
Fakhoury counters: "The worry here is that, if you get picked up for shooting dice and smoking weed, you can be put a list that can be cross referenced. You’re now a marked person for law enforcement. Could that make things worse?"
Though Andrew Papachristos, the Yale sociologist, didn’t help to create the heat list and hasn’t participated in any related visits, his extensive research into Chicago’s crime problems is the basis for much of what the CPD does with predictive analytics. His research has shown, for example, that gun violence spreads similarly to a blood-borne pathogen. People who know each other and hang out in the same circles — people who are a part of the same social network — infect each other with their interests, he found. When those interests include high-risk activities such as carrying a gun or selling drugs, that leads to predictable trouble. He didn’t mention whether any specific groups were likely to be unfairly "marked," per Fakhoury’s suggestion. But he says that "being exposed to violence is an awful thing," and that, "even if [the heat list] doesn't reduce crime, the least it will likely do is diminish the number of people who are exposed to that awful violence."
That’s a best-case scenario, he says.
"If we can divert resources to the right places and proceed automatically to where police and social workers need to be to help people, it would be a fundamental change in the way we approach crime and violence," he says.
"Whether we can actually do that is another question."
Illustrations
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[MENTION=5045]Skarekrow[/MENTION]
On an unrelated note, I'd be careful with posting seemingly irrelevant images that appear in articles.
There is clearly a biasing psychology going on with those images. We really don't want to talk about authoritarian government and then turn around and unwittingly use what is effectively a form of subtle mind control.
This really is a danger with the way the brain associates and accesses information.
On an unrelated note, I'd be careful with posting seemingly irrelevant images that appear in articles.
There is clearly a biasing psychology going on with those images. We really don't want to talk about authoritarian government and then turn around and unwittingly use what is effectively a form of subtle mind control.
This really is a danger with the way the brain associates and accesses information.
Yeah. It's worth thinking about IMO because just look at those things. They clearly say "WE ARE WATCHING YOU!"
If the CPD is up to this and is actually going door to door, I'm sure they'd even approve of those images. There could be a probability that somebody related to the project actually planted those images.
I mean if something like that is going to come out, it may as well come out with some fear, because they'd WANT you to know you're being watched. That's some pretty serious stuff and even I felt manipulated by it. If I'm going to be worried about something, I'd rather it be because the subject is worth worry, not because the red crosshair eye monster told me to be.
Lol...well, it IS scary...that is one of the scariest news stories I have recently read.
It scared me so badly as a matter of fact that I e-mailed the ACLU in regards to it.
What have we come to?
Where is the due process? Innocent until proven guilty?
But more than that...no crime has been committed.
It is intimidating and horrifying.
Yes. And this is exactly how getting people to chase weather modification and UFOs comes to fruition, as I was saying earlier in another thread. Mind games and misdirection.
And people play along like it's some kind of exiting game until the real shit takes place and it is right on your doorstep.
Well, I’ll let you know what they say if the ACLU ever gets back to me...this has to be some sort of rights violation.
I just cannot accept that the police can show up on your doorstep and intimidate an innocent person.
You're probably being a little overdramatic right now. This isn't PreCrime. No one is being arrested because the precogs fingered them. No one is being arrested just because their BFF is a convicted murderer or burglar or drug dealer. It's not illegal for the police to knock on your door and talk to you.
The way that Stroud's article presented in my mind was that they are using statistical analysis of social networks, specifically those of convicts, to focus their search for crime. That in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Far be it from me to support the CPD on anything, either, but if they're limiting these home visits to "Hey, we looked at the people you're hanging out with and are concerned; try to keep your nose clean" and aren't going out of their way to intimidate them, I don't really see the fault in it.
That's not to say that it's unlikely they won't get taken to task in court for trying to develop a system like this, and I wouldn't blame anyone for doing so. Allowing mission creep in law enforcement is a bad precedent to set given that they already enjoy considerable latitude (at least in America) in their operations.
I'd only be seriously concerned when they start seeking legal jurisdiction over potential future crime, and I don't see that happening anytime soon for a number of reasons.
The police are being used as the bully boys of the corporations. They need to be told to back the fuck off
If they want to fight crime and make a REAL difference then they should go arrest the bankers and other financial terrorists involved in all the banking scandals or the politicans involved in various scandals or illegal wars etc THAT'S what will clean up our society
If they want to fight crime and make a REAL difference then they should go arrest the bankers and other financial terrorists involved in all the banking scandals or the politicans involved in various scandals or illegal wars etc THAT'S what will clean up our society
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It sounds like they're using more geographical information systems to interpolate future crimes - kind of like what epidemiologists do which the spread of disease. It also sounds like they did what health researchers do when they look at 'risk factors' for certain diseases - taking into account environment, social, and genetic factors, you can predict someone's risk for developing certain diseases. However, they don't go to that person's door and say "We're watching you, you better not have any icecream!!"
I see flagging geographical areas as crimehubs okay- as it allows for the redistribution of resources and public/private funded projects to potentially help diminish the crimes...but taking it to the point of actually flagging people...yikes...that's scary!
It's interesting that the data can be used for both good and 'bad' things.
I see flagging geographical areas as crimehubs okay- as it allows for the redistribution of resources and public/private funded projects to potentially help diminish the crimes...but taking it to the point of actually flagging people...yikes...that's scary!
It's interesting that the data can be used for both good and 'bad' things.
Well it’s a slippery slope...and honestly, do you think that this won’t be abused by them? Hahahahha!
I don’t think I am being overdramatic...they are picking on people based on a computer algorithm that is NOT public knowledge, may or may not have fair factors in it, and then they are preemptively knocking on their door and intimidating people who the creator of the program likened to “cancer” (really? And what do we do with cancer in our society?)...so maybe their cousin is in a gang...that doesn’t make them a part of it.
If someone has NO criminal record, has committed no crime or is suspected of a crime, then the police shouldn’t be knocking on his/her door - period.
The kid lives in a bad part of town, is black, and dropped out of school...we all have 6 degrees of separation (supposedly)...in certain neighborhoods I’m sure that goes down to 2 or 3 degrees...you cannot assume someone is going to commit a crime because they have a friend of a friend who jacked a car.
And like what @say what said, it’s fine if you use such an algorithm to see where the areas of the most crime are, where more funds and resources need to be allocated...but this is twisted.
How would you personally feel if they knocked on your door and basically said - you better watch yourself, because we are watching you, and there will be consequences.
I wouldn’t find that helpful that is for sure....I would be intimidated.
That is harassment.
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Yeah they made this just to abuse it and not to get that sweet NIJ dosh because
Emotional language. You have no idea what kind of policy they have for these house calls, and therefore have no idea whether they manifest as intimidation or something else.
Yeah I agree that if the list of people isn't made public then at least the process should be made public. There's no reason it shouldn't be public anyway; if the viability of the program would be compromised by publicity, then I don't see how it would reliably function in the first place. By the way it's described, its efficacy would directly correlate with its visibility. It's still experimental though, as stated in the article, so I expect that if they choose to continue developing it then they'll start operating by better-defined guidelines. If they don't, the program will get scrapped either for being shit or because it's politically untenable.
Still emotional language, see above.
That's not really the comparison he was making at all. He wasn't comparing people to cancer, he was comparing violence to cancer. Smoking (being connected to people known for violence) won't necessarily give you cancer (cause you to be violent yourself), but it is a risk factor nonetheless. That's what he was saying. Acknowledging that being surrounded by violent people has a potential to influence one towards committing violence isn't discrimination, it's honesty.
Well, if law enforcement shifts in the future from reactive criminal apprehension to proactive crime interception, it will probably become standard practice to reach out to high-risk individuals through one medium or another.
You make two pretty significant misunderstandings here.
First, while I'm not a sociologist, I'm pretty sure social network theory is more involved than looking at how many relationships a person is removed from another person. If that was their sole criterion, they would have a sizable list to sort through (most of a city), thereby rendering that attempt at efficiency futile. There are a number of factors that can be considered within social networks, and whether they know a guy who knows a guy is just one factor.
Second, you make the implication that the system outlined in the article is based around assuming people are going to commit crimes, when it is explicitly stated in the article that the purpose of the system is to identify people who are at risk to commit a crime. Potential is not equivalent to certainty. I said as much to you in my previous post: it's not The Minority Report. Not yet, anyway.
So it's OK to look at generalizations of groups of people, but it's not OK to look at specific people?
Heyoooo begging the question!
If a policeman knocked on my door and told me that I had been interacting with suspect individuals, and showed me how to be aware of my interactions with them and whether or not those actions will lead to their recidivism/me committing a crime, I'd find that awful helpful and forward-thinking. But seeing as how neither of us knows whether that was the case with the house calls, it's kind of a moot point, huh?
There are well-defined laws at the state level and often at the municipal level regarding harassment, and I don't think anything that's been discussed so far would fall under those definitions.
There's actually various perspectives on this, some believe it's okay, some believe it's not okay, and others believe it's only okay if you incorporate the disenfranchised individuals into the process.
Generalizing, be it social, geographical, gender, age, etc. can be extremely helpful at minimizing the impact of inequalities at a population level. While there's always individual cases that won't fit that 'norm', there is still a wealth of good that can be done by identifying groups or areas that are experience deprivation (e.g., material, environmental, social) and create policies or programs that help mitigated the marginalization.
However, there's another group of people that feel that by doing this, your likely imposing your own beliefs and perspectives of 'what is good' and 'what this group need', disregarding their actual needs and basing these programs/targets on what you, as an outsider, believes.
Then there is participartory research which involves the marginalized groups within the action, and helps bring together the limitations and strengths.
With all that said - I know that's not the point - there is value in this work if used with proper intentions. I can say this firsthand because I have done work with GIS and population mapping. I know my own intentions and how the application of these algorithms and weighting can be used to help benefit the individual. A huge part of what I did was ensuring the that the identify of individuals remained confidential and anonymous. It is unethical to take individual data and use it like this...police should be getting aggregated data to ensure anonymity. But...that would mean everyone was honest- and we know that's not the case!
Well...we are all entitled to our own opinions and thoughts on the subject...not to say you are wrong, because you aren’t...just that I have a different viewpoint on it than you.
It frightens me, not because I think the Minority Report police are going to shoot tear gas through my window and arrest me preemptively, but because of the way human nature is - it will cause more negative problems than problems that it will solve. Even in this experimental stage of the program there are already questions of racial profiling, compounded by their unwillingness to release the factors for selection in the algorithm.
There is already a certain mindset amongst police that certain groups of people are a certain way without taking the individual into account...races, income brackets, etc.
When you use such an algorithm to look at certain neighborhood for example, you are not singling anyone out, you are only acknowledging that there is a problem with higher crime rates in the area...like I said, this could be used to increase police patrols or work with the community on Neighborhood Watch programs...the difference is when you single someone out who has done nothing because they fit a profile. Fitting a profile doesn’t make someone guilty, nor should it make you a suspect.
Even if the police come to your door and are super nice...grinning and happy-go-lucky...they are not justified to be there. The fourth and fifth amendment of the constitution protect us from searches, seizures, or even questioning you without probable cause. Furthermore, in the fifth you are guaranteed due process, the right to be innocent until proven guilty.
If the police can’t enter your house without probable cause and a warrant...then how is it okay for them to come to you and tell you that you are on a short list?
Especially if you are totally 100% innocent.
There is NO probable cause to do that.
Our rights as citizens of course are the rights to not let them in without a warrant...to remain silent...to request counsel...to refuse a search of our person or property...to ask if we are free to go.
And how do you think that will fly with them? Do you think that will make them less suspicious of you or more?
And yes, I have emotional language, because I am emotional about it...it is infuriating, disappointing, and frightening to me...especially if the program becomes the ‘norm’ and is even possibly expanded upon.
So maybe they won’t start arresting people before a crime is committed, but maybe they will start to require them to take a class and be reeducated if they are a lucky selected individual? Or maybe it will prevent them from attaining certain jobs? Prevent them from certain rights that those who are not on the list enjoy?
It’s a slippery slope...that is the main point...it’s a dangerous, discriminatory, and unconstitutional precedent.
And I do believe that he was inferring that violent people are a ‘cancer’...you cannot have violence without violent people.