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Nice, they mentioned the company I founded in college, PredPol. They claim that our algorithm encouraged over policing of minority neighborhoods, but there's no

Nice, they mentioned the company I founded in college, PredPol. They claim that our algorithm encouraged over policing of minority neighborhoods, but there's no such thing as bad press right?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jrs95 9y ago
Maybe there’s such thing as bad downvotes either, your light gray text just draws attention to your comment. I’m kind of interested as to what the definition of “over-police” is in this context, though. Is it disproportionate with or without the consideration of crime levels? It seems like over correcting for this problem could be very bad for the communities it’s intended to protect.
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  People who are making conjectures about the effects of the app really do not understand it or how it was used at all. It's reach and impact were far more limited than most people seem to assume.
- CompanionCuuube 9y ago
  The light gray text did draw my attention to the informed opinion of someone who has worked in that business space.
snsr 9y ago
> independent academics found it can have a disparate impact on poor communities of color. A 2016 study reverse-engineered PredPol’s algorithm and found that it replicated “systemic bias” against over-policed communities of color and that historical crime data did not accurately predict future criminal activity. That sounds like more than "bad press".
- jrs95 9y ago
  In my opinion it really isn’t. Looking at the studies it references, they’re not much different from “press” anyways. They read like the questions and data presented were selected to prove a political point. I’m not trying to just be ideological here either. I just don’t want the dominant ideology in academia and media to be used to attack and surpress technology that could ultimately benefit the communities they’re allegedly harming.
  - gowld 9y ago
    What about promoting technology that could ultimately harm the communities they're allegedly benefiting?
    - jrs95 9y ago
      There’s really not any strong evidence to suggest that was happening. And you can’t test it because all it takes the accusation of racism and some pseudoscience and you’ll be shut down. The closest thing to evidence referenced in the article is this study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.... It makes some weird comparisons. Why have the heat map of drug users? Police are much more interested in drug dealers, and particularly drug dealers who are likely involved in gangs and violent crime. Unfortunately, those individuals are over represented in minority communities, as are violent criminals more generally. It also throws around phrases like "historically over-policed communities" without ever actually explaining what that means or why it occurred. There seems to be a general pattern of taking "systemic racism" and equating that to racial discrimination when the two are not the same. There are problems within minority communities which are significant in driving these disproportionate outcomes, and if we just say "racism" and don't look any further that isn't even going to be considered. If we want to reduce mass incarceration of people for nonviolent crimes, we ought to be reforming the laws, not reducing enforcement just to produce conviction stats we like more. That will almost certainly get people killed.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
Why did you found PredPol?
- omarforgotpwd 9y ago
  My first class of my first day of college was Calculus I. My professor had been working on this project for about 7 years before that, developing a statistical model that could predict crime tomorrow using years of past crime report data. He had an early version of the algorithm implemented in an HTML page with three <textarea> boxes, and a button that invoked a JavaScript implementation of the PredPol algorithm. I helped him make the software better and more usable so we could get it into the hands of more police departments around the world. And then a couple of years ago I left.
jadedhacker 9y ago
If police harass minorities, it generates the most data in the places they harass them. Then they feed this data into the computer and algorithmically generate "unbiased" results that prove they should be harassing minorities.... that is unless this tendency was explicitly corrected for somehow. Was it? If it was, that's its own can of worms, but is at least debatable as to whether there's an acceptable way to do so. Importantly, these algorithms should not be secret. These are the kinds of choices a democratic society should make.
- heartbreak 9y ago
  Additional reading: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09847 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09847
- carlmr 9y ago
  >Then they feed this data into the computer and algorithmically generate "unbiased" results that prove they should be harassing minorities.... Depends on how you use the data. If you learn success rates then it shouldn't depend on the absolute number of people searched. If you just feed raw data into machine learning algorithms, then nobody knows. E.g. you have 100 stop and frisks, 50 in one and 50 in antother neighborhood. Then you might see that you got 1 criminal in one and 10 in the other neighborhood. Then your algorithm will allocate more forces (shouldn't go below a minimum, otherwise no data) in the 20% criminal neighborhood than in the 2% criminal neighborhood. Obviously this will still lead to more searches in more criminal neighborhoods. But that's what you want. You want to use the police force as efficiently as possible to fight crime.
  - tyfon 9y ago
    Unless the police enforce laws differently in different neighbourhoods. In one place you can get off with a warning for violating some traffic rule and in other places you can get arrested and hanged. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland
    - 9y ago

Nice, they mentioned the company I founded in college, PredPol. They claim that our algorithm encouraged over policing of minority neighborhoods, but there's no such thing as bad press right?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jrs95 9y ago

Maybe there’s such thing as bad downvotes either, your light gray text just draws attention to your comment. I’m kind of interested as to what the definition of “over-police” is in this context, though. Is it disproportionate with or without the consideration of crime levels? It seems like over correcting for this problem could be very bad for the communities it’s intended to protect.

omarforgotpwd 9y ago
People who are making conjectures about the effects of the app really do not understand it or how it was used at all. It's reach and impact were far more limited than most people seem to assume.
CompanionCuuube 9y ago
The light gray text did draw my attention to the informed opinion of someone who has worked in that business space.

snsr 9y ago

> independent academics found it can have a disparate impact on poor communities of color. A 2016 study reverse-engineered PredPol’s algorithm and found that it replicated “systemic bias” against over-policed communities of color and that historical crime data did not accurately predict future criminal activity. That sounds like more than "bad press".

jrs95 9y ago
In my opinion it really isn’t. Looking at the studies it references, they’re not much different from “press” anyways. They read like the questions and data presented were selected to prove a political point. I’m not trying to just be ideological here either. I just don’t want the dominant ideology in academia and media to be used to attack and surpress technology that could ultimately benefit the communities they’re allegedly harming.
- gowld 9y ago
  What about promoting technology that could ultimately harm the communities they're allegedly benefiting?
  - jrs95 9y ago
    There’s really not any strong evidence to suggest that was happening. And you can’t test it because all it takes the accusation of racism and some pseudoscience and you’ll be shut down. The closest thing to evidence referenced in the article is this study: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x/pdf http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.... It makes some weird comparisons. Why have the heat map of drug users? Police are much more interested in drug dealers, and particularly drug dealers who are likely involved in gangs and violent crime. Unfortunately, those individuals are over represented in minority communities, as are violent criminals more generally. It also throws around phrases like "historically over-policed communities" without ever actually explaining what that means or why it occurred. There seems to be a general pattern of taking "systemic racism" and equating that to racial discrimination when the two are not the same. There are problems within minority communities which are significant in driving these disproportionate outcomes, and if we just say "racism" and don't look any further that isn't even going to be considered. If we want to reduce mass incarceration of people for nonviolent crimes, we ought to be reforming the laws, not reducing enforcement just to produce conviction stats we like more. That will almost certainly get people killed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

45h34jh53k4j 9y ago

Why did you found PredPol?

omarforgotpwd 9y ago
My first class of my first day of college was Calculus I. My professor had been working on this project for about 7 years before that, developing a statistical model that could predict crime tomorrow using years of past crime report data. He had an early version of the algorithm implemented in an HTML page with three <textarea> boxes, and a button that invoked a JavaScript implementation of the PredPol algorithm. I helped him make the software better and more usable so we could get it into the hands of more police departments around the world. And then a couple of years ago I left.

jadedhacker 9y ago

If police harass minorities, it generates the most data in the places they harass them. Then they feed this data into the computer and algorithmically generate "unbiased" results that prove they should be harassing minorities.... that is unless this tendency was explicitly corrected for somehow. Was it? If it was, that's its own can of worms, but is at least debatable as to whether there's an acceptable way to do so. Importantly, these algorithms should not be secret. These are the kinds of choices a democratic society should make.

heartbreak 9y ago
Additional reading: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09847 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09847
carlmr 9y ago
>Then they feed this data into the computer and algorithmically generate "unbiased" results that prove they should be harassing minorities.... Depends on how you use the data. If you learn success rates then it shouldn't depend on the absolute number of people searched. If you just feed raw data into machine learning algorithms, then nobody knows. E.g. you have 100 stop and frisks, 50 in one and 50 in antother neighborhood. Then you might see that you got 1 criminal in one and 10 in the other neighborhood. Then your algorithm will allocate more forces (shouldn't go below a minimum, otherwise no data) in the 20% criminal neighborhood than in the 2% criminal neighborhood. Obviously this will still lead to more searches in more criminal neighborhoods. But that's what you want. You want to use the police force as efficiently as possible to fight crime.
- tyfon 9y ago
  Unless the police enforce laws differently in different neighbourhoods. In one place you can get off with a warning for violating some traffic rule and in other places you can get arrested and hanged. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Sandra_Bland
  - 9y ago