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 pa

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.