10 ms·

Dubai Police now using Crime Prediction software

94 points by futureguy 10y ago

fixxer 10y ago
Great... Maybe now they can use their precognition software to find more adulterous women (rape victims) or hostile employees (slaves from South Asia).
- wildchild 10y ago
  Sure they will search for runaway slaves.
prawn 10y ago
I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in a certain area and time were prone to acting up, it could propose some sort of distraction instead - street ball tournament, TV station truck doing an impromptu giveaway, police outreach, etc.
- yakult 10y ago
  It is best to take the pessimistic view whenever it comes to how policies are applied and how technical solutions are used. Sure, it can be used constructively, but there will always be a few assholes using it to oppress their enemies and exploit it for material gain. Much like you can predict the success of a spam filter by thinking about how it will be exploited by the worst 1%, it is instructive to think about what this tool will do in the hands of ignorant, uncaring and corrupt assholes, because that's probably how it'll turn out. And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful would come of it. Failing to even think in such directions, and instead pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the way.
  - brbsix 10y ago
    Speeches are written. Interviews are scripted. Personas are cultivated. I'm not sure how it would be able to ascertain whether a politician is a sociopath any more than it would be able to determine whether Brad Pitt is after analyzing one of his films.
    - lostlogin 10y ago
      Your argument would have been a lot stronger this time last year. Brexit and the Philippines are notable examples of some fairly sociopathic political behaviour that fairly closely followed on-record comments. What happens next year will be the exciting part.
    - PavlovsCat 10y ago
      We don't know how neural nets can do stuff like schizophrenia from CCTV footage, merely from how someone walks, but apparently this and other things are already emerging, and with some earnest effort could provide some real results. Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
  - otakucode 10y ago
    I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse. I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned. So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
- justaaron 10y ago
  One issue is that the AI system has inbuilt racial bias, to the degree that it's tuned with prior data and the algorithms seek to find "more of the same". It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc. There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO. Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve" Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.) If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more. (of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...) The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense. Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
  - briandear 10y ago
    1500? Not true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.) Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer." As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
    - otakucode 10y ago
      There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)
- dx034 10y ago
  If you'd spend enough money on social services, they could certainly use these systems to send out people and help the potential criminals. I guess you'd quickly see that these areas will also have problematic schools where extra money is probably a way better crime prevention method than policing. The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
- briandear 10y ago
  That's a great idea -- pre-crime prevention. There might be something to your idea; sort of like a tornado warning but for crime and the mitigation method would be to deploy positive resources to the area. Kind of like a SWAT team for helping diffuse potential crime with love/support rather than a show of force.
- otakucode 10y ago
  In order for such a thing to work, 2 things would have to be true: First, those able to make the decisions to do such things would need to be willing to listen to the AI. Second, the AI would need to be saying things that we do not already know would help. Because if it's just saying things like "reduce economic disparity to lower the crime rate" and "increase autonomy of adolescents" and similar that we have had the research for decades to show are effective, well, why would those able to change things listen? They ignore research, they're not going to listen to an AI if it's saying things that conflict with their worldview that produced the problems in the first place...
  - notahacker 10y ago
    I'm not sure the insights into things already well-known are that sophisticated. I'd imagine it's more along the lines of "computer thinks street crime less likely to happen if there's a visible police presence outside bars on Friday night" (or applied to Dubai "if you maintain a visible presence at these hotel bars the men in them will have to book their prostitutes online instead" and "watch the foreign workers closely and your conviction rate will skyrocket") These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  lol. You don't need crime prediction software to figure out which neighborhoods could benefit from a youth program.
deepnotderp 10y ago
Excellent! Now they can overfit their models to certain facial structures and claim they're doing "cutting edge security". The "blah blah" MACHINE LEARNING strikes again....
omegaworks 10y ago
Organizing for labor rights looks an awful lot like crime to the capitalist. Especially the capitalist holding their employees' passports hostage while they perform a modern form of indentured slavery. [0] Please don't contribute to software that promotes and sustains this practice, resist in any way you can. 0. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai
- KON_Air 10y ago
  Dubai is light years away from understanding, let alone practising, capitalism. And no, unless you are talking about contemporary Comedy Imperialism with Crony Capitalism sauce on top of it, one of Capitalisms core principles is respecting all sorts of capital beyond monetary ones. Ya'know I'm just saying, things like abolishing slavery and competing for and trying to create quality workforce... stuff nobody cares about when it comes to capitalism for last few decades, which were supposed to lead into socialism if it functioned well.
  - omegaworks 10y ago
    I probably went too far in commingling the power of the state and the primary benefactors of its economic system. Some citizens then use this state-force to avoid providing foreign workers with even the most basic rights. This commingling of state power and economic power just reminded me of the early days of labor struggle in America. [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike
- Senji 10y ago
  So, what you're saying is. People shouldn't have voted for Clinton? Seeing as we're resisting in any way we can.
- titomc 10y ago
  US is no better if you want to speak about indentured servitude, that is H1B. https://medium.com/@seeminglyquiet/modern-day-slavery-in-america-the-h1b-visa-800be3a3df54#.kx0kwvkhb https://medium.com/@seeminglyquiet/modern-day-slavery-in-ame...
onion2k 10y ago
So if you're devising some sort of GTA-style heist, make sure you include a strong source of randomness in your plans.
automatwon 10y ago
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title was "Lamborghini". Indeed, the article would have that picture to start with. It's funny that this was my first thought, but it says a lot about perception of Dubai, in general. I can't put a word on it, but the fact that they have Lamborghini police cars makes me say "Pfft. Of course the police would have crime prediction software. Duh." The word is at the intersection somewhere in the Platonic clouds of tech billionaire, startup, ridiculous, no-brainer / obvious, Vertu, excessive, prudent, utility, vanity. I guess 'Dubai' is a sufficient stand-in word.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  To be fair, they're not the only Police force doing the Lambo stunt ;) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police-lamborghini https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police...
  - karmacoda 10y ago
    Ah, but the two Italian Lamborghinis were donated. Otherwise I would've been very unimpressed.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      Even if they weren't, the cars are made in Italy. I'd consider it reasonable for the police there to purchase the cars.
eb0la 10y ago
I guess they are not the first. There is a company from Israel that deployed 10 years ago algoritms to score if people was lying, or angry when people called the police. And it makes sense. Anything that helps you triage when you have limited resources it's a good idea. And any tool that suggest deterrent actions to keep your resources is also a good idea (ie police near a metro station next to a stadium hours before a sports event so pickpocketers don't come nearby). For me the weakest point is not the technical part (mechanisms), is how you use them (policies). I mean, you need some policy to trigger reactions to signals. And since policies are made by human people, that has more bias than any algorithm you can ever produce, plus and policy changes will surely affect how the "system" works and how it needs retraining. So, unless this is used for very simple stuff with simple policies it won't work.
hohenheim 10y ago
And they also do shit like this: http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-arrested-for-giving-birth-to-illegitimate-baby-1.1947750 http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-arrested-for-giving-...
- spraak 10y ago
  How sad for the baby and mother :( and anyone there who is affected by laws like this. What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant?
  - rl3 10y ago
    >What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant? Probably made an example of just the same, like the rest of the slave class there. It really miffs me that UAE receives all this Western patronage. In a just world they'd be embargoed into the ground until they adopted decent human rights practices.
    - s_kilk 10y ago
      Maybe western governments find their odious record on human rights aspirational, rather than repulsive?
      - user837387 10y ago
        The west doesn't give a fuck. They say they do but it is not true. Most of us are just a bunch of hypocrites. Some people do have principles but a big portion does not. Just look at who all the evangelicals voted for in the U.S. presidential election. They voted for [1]You Know Who even after he admitted that he liked to grab em by the billy bush. Now every-time I hear them talk about Jesus I remember who they voted for and smile. They are not fooling me twice. [1] Last time I mentioned his name I got down-voted to oblivion. Lets see what happens this time. :)
        chillingeffect 10y ago
delegate 10y ago
> The idea isn't just to go there and arrest suspicious-looking people, but to use a larger police presence in an area to deter crime from happening in the first place. But then if the crime does not happen, what is this software predicting ?
faragon 10y ago
I was tempted to work for a company of Dubai in 2005, and discarded it because of the legal stuff involved. Scary.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  Wise decision. Don't even visit the gulf states if you've ever worked for someone there and something went wrong, even if you weren't at fault and the work was done elsewhere. You have no rights in their system.
kylehotchkiss 10y ago
This seems like a net win to me. We imagine this with USA police and see where things could go wrong, but our police and Dubai's police have unique sets of problems to deal with. Dubai has a very very high incentive to keep their crime rates as low as possible, and being a much more young growing nation with the capital to do so, this certainly keeps their appeal as a place to do business and vacation viable despite the region they're in.
ada1981 10y ago
I'd imagine that this simply displaces the crime to other areas. It could see short-term impact but I'm less clear on the long term reduction in crime vs. simply shifting it in a game of wack-a-mole -- I'd be curious on research. However, this sort of information would be useful if you could figure out where support structures could be put in place vs simply deploying police... ie, planting community gardens, providing housing to the homeless, providing fresh food and child care, teaching parenting skills, etc. Of course, you don't really need software to tell you that providing for people's basic needs drastically reduces crime.
anocendi 10y ago
What is your hue? Psycho-pass and Minority Report becoming reality?
BickNowstrom 10y ago
This is just automating capacity planning. Now done by hand, but better done with computers. As to the degree this is "encoding racial bias", I feel this is passing the buck to the computer. The computer is merely calculating a probability distribution on historical data the best it possibly can (and likely, more accurate, effective, and with more objectivity than humans ever can). Impartiality or partiality does not start or end with a computer program, it starts with human policies. One does not solve police racism by creating a model that adheres to your view of an ideal world. This argumentation is naive. It does not change anything, but perhaps makes you feel good. You either solve it at its core, or you don't solve it at all. One should also distinguish between heavy-crime areas and police bias. Some areas, where a certain race may be overrepresented, are just more prone to street crimes. This is not bias, but fact. Don't cripple your model, just because you don't agree with the facts. As for white collar crime vs. street crime; automated systems to detect fraud, insider trading, scams, and theft, are also in place. These just don't benefit from capacity planning / more police presence on the streets. The Minority Report angle is journalistic nonsense / click-bait, akin to invoking Terminator when talking about Google's AI efforts. This is about areas of crime, not pre-crime for individuals. These systems can adapt. If an area sees a drop in crime rate, then that area requires less police presence. It is not just trained on a single snapshot. Finally, such Crime Prediction software can be used by human police officers to make better decisions. It is far off from self-driving police cars without any human input. Note, I am not saying algorithmic bias does not exist, or that this is not an important issue to solve, as we start automating more processes in society. But then, let's discuss it on fair and equal ground, and leave human bias against "human-biased" systems out. We can talk about this mathematically now, or at least, in a non-emotional rational manner. Aside: Other comments here are very America-centric, and detract from the topic at hand. It's like posting news articles on manual SWAT-raids gone wrong in NY, when discussing predictive policing software in California.

94 points by futureguy 10y ago

Great... Maybe now they can use their precognition software to find more adulterous women (rape victims) or hostile employees (slaves from South Asia).

wildchild 10y ago
Sure they will search for runaway slaves.

prawn 10y ago

I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in a certain area and time were prone to acting up, it could propose some sort of distraction instead - street ball tournament, TV station truck doing an impromptu giveaway, police outreach, etc.

yakult 10y ago
It is best to take the pessimistic view whenever it comes to how policies are applied and how technical solutions are used. Sure, it can be used constructively, but there will always be a few assholes using it to oppress their enemies and exploit it for material gain. Much like you can predict the success of a spam filter by thinking about how it will be exploited by the worst 1%, it is instructive to think about what this tool will do in the hands of ignorant, uncaring and corrupt assholes, because that's probably how it'll turn out. And that's why we can't have nice things, which is the common thread between telemetry in win10, trigger warnings in colleges and censorship on social media.
PavlovsCat 10y ago
It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful would come of it. Failing to even think in such directions, and instead pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the way.
- brbsix 10y ago
  Speeches are written. Interviews are scripted. Personas are cultivated. I'm not sure how it would be able to ascertain whether a politician is a sociopath any more than it would be able to determine whether Brad Pitt is after analyzing one of his films.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Your argument would have been a lot stronger this time last year. Brexit and the Philippines are notable examples of some fairly sociopathic political behaviour that fairly closely followed on-record comments. What happens next year will be the exciting part.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    We don't know how neural nets can do stuff like schizophrenia from CCTV footage, merely from how someone walks, but apparently this and other things are already emerging, and with some earnest effort could provide some real results. Mind you, I was talking about neural suggesting people for clinical diagnosis, not about neural nets diagnosing people. And to be perfectly honest, I'm not even that much interested in the idea (which strikes me as a bit Orwellian), but in the cold feet it would give a lot of people with skeletons in the closet. They don't know that it's not fool proof, they just know they don't want to be found out.
- otakucode 10y ago
  I have actually been wanting to do something very similar to what you propose for a long time. Not as an effective measure or anything, but specifically to show people how such technology CAN be used. My specific idea would be to take news stories and other data around each member of Congress, and train a system to predict how likely each member of Congress is to be cheating on their spouse. I got this idea when everyone responded to the revelations about the NSA spying on everyone in an extremely specific way 100% of the time. Everyone focused on human analysts reading the text or listening to the audio of conversations. Read literally any article you find where the NSA, Obama, others in the government, absolutely anyone talks about the things the NSA has done and how they practices might be altered. In every single case, they talk solely about human analysts reading things directly. They never once talk about automated systems analyzing communications and inferring behavior profiles, using those inferred profiles to make decisions or target investigations, nothing like that. And that's where essentially all of the actual danger lies as far as I'm concerned. So perhaps if a website popped up rating each Congressperson on how likely it is they are cheating on their spouse determined by a neural net (or hell even a Bayesian filter, it doesn't actually need to be accurate at all), maybe we could actually get someone to talk about the issue. Because as it is, no one ever has or is willing to as far as I have seen. I don't know if it's because the politicians aren't aware of what such systems can do, or if they've been tricked into thinking they can actually be effective (they can't) so they intentionally try to misdirect people to concentrating on "they'll stop listening in on your phone calls" or what. The only reason I haven't built the site is that I'm unsure if there would be legal implications and if I'd end up charged with slander or something.
justaaron 10y ago
One issue is that the AI system has inbuilt racial bias, to the degree that it's tuned with prior data and the algorithms seek to find "more of the same". It leads to profiling and arrest of teens DRESSED in a certain way or hanging out at a certain location, etc. There is also a major ethical problem with harrassing people for things they didn't actually DO. Look, unless you've had run-ins with the business side of law-enforcement you may believe the myth that police are there to "protect and serve" Law-enforcement has a single task to catch people breaking laws (any kind, the easier and lower risk to catch them, the better) and process them (arrest, run them in the system, write up the particular offenses, etc.) If anything, the moral/ethical culture in policing in most cities only ENCOURAGES this kind of snap-judgement thinking as well. We need LESS of that and not more. (of course, if you are Dubai, you consider it a grave public danger if someone is smoking a joint somewhere or engaging in consensual acts between 2 adults who happen to be of the same sex, etc...) The CULTURE in law-enforcement is already one of impunity, and globally there is a reason that in perhaps 90% of the planets nations there is some derogatory remark for police rooted in their "us vs them thin blue line" nonsense. Look at America, and it's rash of police killings. Over 1500 last year. There needs to be fundamental reform of most policing in the 21st century before we give them more tools to act like bullies with...
- briandear 10y ago
  1500? Not true. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shoo... And the vast majority of those were clearly justified (suspect being armed and posing an obvious threat threat.) Police are far from perfect but they also have to deal with people on a daily basis who are quite literally the dregs of society: where "F--- you pig!" is as common as "Thank you Officer." As far as inbuilt racial bias -- have you spent time on the streets? You tell me what the percentages are for a crime being committed among different racial and ethnic groups. If you're in Chicago you are far more likely to be shot by a male of a specific racial group than by any other. That's just a fact. Nothing racist about it.
  - otakucode 10y ago
    There is some bias in such a system, though. On the whole, for instance, white collar crime kills more people, and does more economic damage to society than street crime ever does by a significant margin. But we'll build and deploy a system to tackle street crime, not one to tackle white collar crime. That's a conscious decision on the part of our society, and part of the reason why crime is normalized in white collar circles. And it certainly does our society no favors. (For the research into the normalization of white collar crime, and its greater harm to society, I listened to the 'Explaining Social Deviance' course by Prof. Paul Root Worpe a few years ago)
dx034 10y ago
If you'd spend enough money on social services, they could certainly use these systems to send out people and help the potential criminals. I guess you'd quickly see that these areas will also have problematic schools where extra money is probably a way better crime prevention method than policing. The problem with this is that the effect is not easy to measure. If you bring down the crime rate by policing than this can directly be associated with the cost spent. If you improve a school and the crime rate goes down the effect is much harder to measure, and cost/benefit will be in different organizations within the government.
briandear 10y ago
That's a great idea -- pre-crime prevention. There might be something to your idea; sort of like a tornado warning but for crime and the mitigation method would be to deploy positive resources to the area. Kind of like a SWAT team for helping diffuse potential crime with love/support rather than a show of force.
otakucode 10y ago
In order for such a thing to work, 2 things would have to be true: First, those able to make the decisions to do such things would need to be willing to listen to the AI. Second, the AI would need to be saying things that we do not already know would help. Because if it's just saying things like "reduce economic disparity to lower the crime rate" and "increase autonomy of adolescents" and similar that we have had the research for decades to show are effective, well, why would those able to change things listen? They ignore research, they're not going to listen to an AI if it's saying things that conflict with their worldview that produced the problems in the first place...
- notahacker 10y ago
  I'm not sure the insights into things already well-known are that sophisticated. I'd imagine it's more along the lines of "computer thinks street crime less likely to happen if there's a visible police presence outside bars on Friday night" (or applied to Dubai "if you maintain a visible presence at these hotel bars the men in them will have to book their prostitutes online instead" and "watch the foreign workers closely and your conviction rate will skyrocket") These sort of predictions "work", for certain values of work...
forgottenpass 10y ago
lol. You don't need crime prediction software to figure out which neighborhoods could benefit from a youth program.

deepnotderp 10y ago

Excellent! Now they can overfit their models to certain facial structures and claim they're doing "cutting edge security". The "blah blah" MACHINE LEARNING strikes again....

omegaworks 10y ago

Organizing for labor rights looks an awful lot like crime to the capitalist. Especially the capitalist holding their employees' passports hostage while they perform a modern form of indentured slavery. [0] Please don't contribute to software that promotes and sustains this practice, resist in any way you can. 0. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai

KON_Air 10y ago
Dubai is light years away from understanding, let alone practising, capitalism. And no, unless you are talking about contemporary Comedy Imperialism with Crony Capitalism sauce on top of it, one of Capitalisms core principles is respecting all sorts of capital beyond monetary ones. Ya'know I'm just saying, things like abolishing slavery and competing for and trying to create quality workforce... stuff nobody cares about when it comes to capitalism for last few decades, which were supposed to lead into socialism if it functioned well.
- omegaworks 10y ago
  I probably went too far in commingling the power of the state and the primary benefactors of its economic system. Some citizens then use this state-force to avoid providing foreign workers with even the most basic rights. This commingling of state power and economic power just reminded me of the early days of labor struggle in America. [0] 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike
Senji 10y ago
So, what you're saying is. People shouldn't have voted for Clinton? Seeing as we're resisting in any way we can.
titomc 10y ago
US is no better if you want to speak about indentured servitude, that is H1B. https://medium.com/@seeminglyquiet/modern-day-slavery-in-america-the-h1b-visa-800be3a3df54#.kx0kwvkhb https://medium.com/@seeminglyquiet/modern-day-slavery-in-ame...

onion2k 10y ago

So if you're devising some sort of GTA-style heist, make sure you include a strong source of randomness in your plans.

automatwon 10y ago

The first thing I thought of when I saw the title was "Lamborghini". Indeed, the article would have that picture to start with. It's funny that this was my first thought, but it says a lot about perception of Dubai, in general. I can't put a word on it, but the fact that they have Lamborghini police cars makes me say "Pfft. Of course the police would have crime prediction software. Duh." The word is at the intersection somewhere in the Platonic clouds of tech billionaire, startup, ridiculous, no-brainer / obvious, Vertu, excessive, prudent, utility, vanity. I guess 'Dubai' is a sufficient stand-in word.

chinathrow 10y ago
To be fair, they're not the only Police force doing the Lambo stunt ;) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police-lamborghini https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police...
- karmacoda 10y ago
  Ah, but the two Italian Lamborghinis were donated. Otherwise I would've been very unimpressed.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    Even if they weren't, the cars are made in Italy. I'd consider it reasonable for the police there to purchase the cars.

eb0la 10y ago

I guess they are not the first. There is a company from Israel that deployed 10 years ago algoritms to score if people was lying, or angry when people called the police. And it makes sense. Anything that helps you triage when you have limited resources it's a good idea. And any tool that suggest deterrent actions to keep your resources is also a good idea (ie police near a metro station next to a stadium hours before a sports event so pickpocketers don't come nearby). For me the weakest point is not the technical part (mechanisms), is how you use them (policies). I mean, you need some policy to trigger reactions to signals. And since policies are made by human people, that has more bias than any algorithm you can ever produce, plus and policy changes will surely affect how the "system" works and how it needs retraining. So, unless this is used for very simple stuff with simple policies it won't work.

hohenheim 10y ago

And they also do shit like this: http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-arrested-for-giving-birth-to-illegitimate-baby-1.1947750 http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-arrested-for-giving-...

spraak 10y ago
How sad for the baby and mother :( and anyone there who is affected by laws like this. What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant?
- rl3 10y ago
  >What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant? Probably made an example of just the same, like the rest of the slave class there. It really miffs me that UAE receives all this Western patronage. In a just world they'd be embargoed into the ground until they adopted decent human rights practices.
  - s_kilk 10y ago
    Maybe western governments find their odious record on human rights aspirational, rather than repulsive?
    - user837387 10y ago
      The west doesn't give a fuck. They say they do but it is not true. Most of us are just a bunch of hypocrites. Some people do have principles but a big portion does not. Just look at who all the evangelicals voted for in the U.S. presidential election. They voted for [1]You Know Who even after he admitted that he liked to grab em by the billy bush. Now every-time I hear them talk about Jesus I remember who they voted for and smile. They are not fooling me twice. [1] Last time I mentioned his name I got down-voted to oblivion. Lets see what happens this time. :)
      - chillingeffect 10y ago

delegate 10y ago

> The idea isn't just to go there and arrest suspicious-looking people, but to use a larger police presence in an area to deter crime from happening in the first place. But then if the crime does not happen, what is this software predicting ?

faragon 10y ago

I was tempted to work for a company of Dubai in 2005, and discarded it because of the legal stuff involved. Scary.

angry_octet 10y ago
Wise decision. Don't even visit the gulf states if you've ever worked for someone there and something went wrong, even if you weren't at fault and the work was done elsewhere. You have no rights in their system.

kylehotchkiss 10y ago

This seems like a net win to me. We imagine this with USA police and see where things could go wrong, but our police and Dubai's police have unique sets of problems to deal with. Dubai has a very very high incentive to keep their crime rates as low as possible, and being a much more young growing nation with the capital to do so, this certainly keeps their appeal as a place to do business and vacation viable despite the region they're in.

ada1981 10y ago

I'd imagine that this simply displaces the crime to other areas. It could see short-term impact but I'm less clear on the long term reduction in crime vs. simply shifting it in a game of wack-a-mole -- I'd be curious on research. However, this sort of information would be useful if you could figure out where support structures could be put in place vs simply deploying police... ie, planting community gardens, providing housing to the homeless, providing fresh food and child care, teaching parenting skills, etc. Of course, you don't really need software to tell you that providing for people's basic needs drastically reduces crime.

anocendi 10y ago

What is your hue? Psycho-pass and Minority Report becoming reality?

BickNowstrom 10y ago

This is just automating capacity planning. Now done by hand, but better done with computers. As to the degree this is "encoding racial bias", I feel this is passing the buck to the computer. The computer is merely calculating a probability distribution on historical data the best it possibly can (and likely, more accurate, effective, and with more objectivity than humans ever can). Impartiality or partiality does not start or end with a computer program, it starts with human policies. One does not solve police racism by creating a model that adheres to your view of an ideal world. This argumentation is naive. It does not change anything, but perhaps makes you feel good. You either solve it at its core, or you don't solve it at all. One should also distinguish between heavy-crime areas and police bias. Some areas, where a certain race may be overrepresented, are just more prone to street crimes. This is not bias, but fact. Don't cripple your model, just because you don't agree with the facts. As for white collar crime vs. street crime; automated systems to detect fraud, insider trading, scams, and theft, are also in place. These just don't benefit from capacity planning / more police presence on the streets. The Minority Report angle is journalistic nonsense / click-bait, akin to invoking Terminator when talking about Google's AI efforts. This is about areas of crime, not pre-crime for individuals. These systems can adapt. If an area sees a drop in crime rate, then that area requires less police presence. It is not just trained on a single snapshot. Finally, such Crime Prediction software can be used by human police officers to make better decisions. It is far off from self-driving police cars without any human input. Note, I am not saying algorithmic bias does not exist, or that this is not an important issue to solve, as we start automating more processes in society. But then, let's discuss it on fair and equal ground, and leave human bias against "human-biased" systems out. We can talk about this mathematically now, or at least, in a non-emotional rational manner. Aside: Other comments here are very America-centric, and detract from the topic at hand. It's like posting news articles on manual SWAT-raids gone wrong in NY, when discussing predictive policing software in California.