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> police departments predict crime routinely. It's a core part of what it means to run a large city police department. You don't allocate patrols uniformly acro
by forapurpose 9y ago
> police departments predict crime routinely. It's a core part of what it means to run a large city police department. You don't allocate patrols uniformly across the city; that makes no sense.
Predicting crime at the geographic level is much different than predicting it at the individual level, in terms of people's freedom and rights. EDIT: And even on the geographic level, it leads to many abuses including 'stop and frisk'.
- tptacek 9y agoThe problematic policy in "stop and frisk" is the stopping and frisking, not the prediction.
- mulmen 9y agoI'm not sure if I have parsed this correctly. My understanding of stop and frisk is that there is a significant racial bias involved. To me this seems like part of the prediction. In my mind both aspects of stop and frisk are problematic.
- wfo 9y agoI think most opponents of stop and frisk disagree with you: it's both. Police routinely "predict" that black and brown people are criminals, and stop and frisk allows them to act on these predictions without evidence. I think the argument here is that systems like Palantir quickly and easily become a technological proxy for these "predictions" and makes permanent the biases and racism used to create the data sets that drive them. If NYPD set up patrols on wall street to stop and frisk bankers on their way home from work searching for cocaine or evidence of fraud it would be a very different issue.