The study you link is of a very different kind of system: creating a list of people considered likely to be victims of homicide or violent crime, and trying to

The study you link is of a very different kind of system: creating a list of people considered likely to be victims of homicide or violent crime, and trying to intercede. PredPol, the system in the article, does not do that. PredPol is primarily about mapping crime in space, and trying to predict which regions of space are most likely to have future crime. It doesn't focus on individuals in any way. The people behind PredPol did run a randomized controlled field trial with LAPD and claim to have found reductions in crime by directing patrols to predicted hotspots [1]. Hotspots policing studies generally have found reductions in crime when directing patrols to hotspots, or conducting targeted interventions (like improving street lighting, talking to local businesses, etc.). But I should note that running a good, well-controlled experiment of something like policing is very hard, so the quality of the evidence is not exactly astounding. However, there are indeed constitutional implications, as you note. For example, if a model says an area is a "high crime area", police may be able to use that as part of the justification for stop-and-frisk, reducing the need for any individual suspicion or reason to search you. And, of course, there are fairness problems: high-crime areas tend to be poor and minority areas, and hotspots policing may harm trust in police (if they harass the residents for petty offenses) and either lead to overpolicing or underreporting of offenses. I have a fairly thorough review of the literature on my website [2]. [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.2015.1077710 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01621459.2015.10... [2] https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/predictive-policing.html https://www.refsmmat.com/notebooks/predictive-policing.html