10 ms·

This doesn't seem to make sense. By more accurately predicting where crimes will occur, the police departments can reduce the amount of patrols needed.

catalogia 6y ago
If they inaccurately predict where crime will occur, their recommendations could cause an elevated number of patrols in some neighborhoods.
- retortio 6y ago
  And if they accurately predict where crime will occur, they will reduce crime in those neighborhoods. It's likely that they would be able to get good results.
  - catalogia 6y ago
    > And if they accurately predict where crime will occur That's a very big "if"
lawnchair_larry 6y ago
Nothing that these people are doing makes sense or demonstrates any capacity for forethought.
- eplanit 6y ago
  It demonstrates an extreme and irrational fear of thoughtcrime, though.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  There are very good reasons why proactive policing leads to bad outcomes. You could read up on that before. Predicting where you will need to send patrols is proactive policing.
uoaei 6y ago
I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  On that note, I encourage everyone to read more PKD in general. You can't go (too) wrong reading any of his stuff. Valis is pretty f'in weird, but still harmless. I think.
- nickff 6y ago
  The book ("The Minority Report") and the movie have radically different messages.
- retortio 6y ago
  That's like telling someone planning on getting their driver's license to watch The Fast and the Furious as if it has any relation to actual driving anyone encounters.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie. This is fiction.
  - munk-a 6y ago
    Fiction is a really powerful tool that can be used to warn us of societal dangers while sparing us actually needing to live through them. It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen. Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
mindcrime 6y ago
I would agree with that, if we lived in the futuristic utopian society of Star Trek:TNG. But our world appears to be closer to a cyberpunk dystopia, where you can't trust the powers-that-be to use that kind of technology for good, peaceful, and just ends. Instead, they'll use it to advance their own greed and hate fueled agendas, and to perpetuate existing structural biases.
qntty 6y ago
People in high crime neighborhoods rightly regard the police as the enemy, because the police treat them as the enemy. Giving the enemy better intel is never desirable.
sudosysgen 6y ago
Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests. Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on. Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year. Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.
- gloryofman 6y ago
  Not all crime is equal, and to present crime as purely a dollar value is a bit disingenuous. Wage theft is important, and isn't pursued nearly enough, but it isn't on the same level as violent crime, which happens primarily in disadvantaged communities. Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  The 'proactive' is just driving or walking around a neighborhood. It isn't (necessarily) doing things like stop and frisk or just going around accosting random people on the street.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    It's not just driving or walking around a neighbourhood, it's doing your best to find the maximum amount of crime. Otherwise, you wouldn't need mathematical models in order to optimize the "efficacity" of the operation. The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective (targeted assassinations, for example), or the police isn't being called because the victim thinks it will make the situation worse. Which in many cases is true, and I think fixing that problem would be a good step to take.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jfengel 6y ago
Not if the patrols they are sending have been taught to see all of the people in those places as targets. Police can literally make things worse. Even the victims of crime often don't want police there. This has been known in those communities for decades. It's only the most obvious, well-documented brutality that has begun to make other people aware of it. It's the broad reaction to that brutality, where other police and their strongest supporters reflexively excuse the inexcusable, that have made people like these mathematicians realize that sending the police doesn't solve the problems that their models are pinpointing. If the mathematicians want to help people, they'll model the broader causes of poverty, injustice, and inequality. Then we can try to solve the real problems, rather than "I heard there was a problem, let's send in people with guns until it gets better."
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  The victim's desires for police involvement is usually not very relevant. The victim can not provide any information to the police, but that doesn't mean that the police can't or shouldn't do anything. Respecting the victim's wishes is basically giving tacic approval of spousal abuse and honor killings.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    You don't fix spousal abuse nor honour killing by sending police to arrest people in poor neighbourhood. You fix spousal abuse by social interventions and honour killing by targeted response combined with social interventions.
    - devtul 6y ago
      Are you saying that the visible presence of the police won't stop any type of crime, or just specifically your spousal abuse example?
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        In general physical presence of police helps crime in the short term, but not in the media to long term, instead it likely makes it worse. The spousal abuse example wasn't mine, but the GP's.
bena 6y ago
But if we put the wrong numbers in, we won't get the right numbers out. This sort of prediction depends on the data being good. That's not a given. Even the crime statistics are problematic. There is an issue with certain groups getting treated differently in arrests and convictions. So you could have an area that doesn't have much crime reported because when crime happens it's not reported as crime. Whereas you can have other areas that have a lot more crime reported because there is less leniency given to the population.
bonoboTP 6y ago
The problem is, as someone in the field of AI, I can see how much overhyped low-quality products are sold to stakeholders believing they are getting a human-like or godlike artificially intelligent thing, when it's just a bunch of linear regressions or multilayer perceptrons operating on unsanitized data without proper evaluations or misleading numbers in the marketing, careless ways of separating training and test data etc. I think what the article says is likely to be true. It's a scientific cover-your-ass label for the high-ups to be able to do whatever they want and justify it. Similar to how CEOs bring in external consultants and pay them fat money so the CEOs can now do whatever they wanted originally, but now with Big Consulting Firm's stamp of approval. You can make these "AI" models skew to the direction you want. Just as it is with statistics and p-hacking, only that the machine learning community is even less versed in confidence values and is just generally less mature in terms of best practices as it's a newer field. And absolutely researchers should pay attention to who they work for and where the money comes from. Fundamental research is one thing, working on general AI is useful for all human endeavors just like working on energy efficiency or better cars. It's a necessary part of life that bad actors have benefits from a tide raising all ships. But it's not the same when directly working on a project for a bad actor. Similar to how Google engineers stood up against military projects or serving the Chinese censoring machine, it is important for mathematicians and computer scientists to consider whether they are building something unethical. These are professionals, intellectuals who have more responsibility than lower paid workers. We cannot blame the cleaning personnel or the cooks at the police canteen in the same way. It is part of one's civic duty as an intellectual to reflect upon one's societal role and impact. Again, this is not about fundamental research, that might be used for evil purposes. It's about directly working for corrupt organizations. Whether the police in general (or which specific levels or branches) is corrupt enough to refuse working for them and how much worse they are compared to big corporations is hard for me to judge from Europe. But it's certainly something that people working for them should reflect on and make a moral choice because they are the ones who see what they actually work on. There are many places for mathematicians and computer scientists to work at and so they have the luxury to follow their conscience. And all this also applies to intelligence agencies, like the NSA and others as well.
pizza 6y ago
There is a contradiction in expecting an organization that enhances its capabilities to use its capabilities less. Not that predicting where crimes will occur is really a thing - more likely you are just predicting where a population is getting policed.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  It holds on the assumption of preventative power from those capabilities. Communicable diseases are a good example of a context - if everyone was treated for say tuberculosis with increased capacity then the number of cases would stay down vs just 'stabilizing" the numbers. See nuclear weaponry for an example of declining use. Deterrence and deescalation are where predictive policing could theoretically be useful but in practice it is often just bias laundering or reinforcing their tautologies. Looking at the "wrong side of the tracks" more and the arrest rates will climb there even if crime is actually lower there - let alone confounding variables. Like say the police being called in domestic disputes by witnesses in thin walled apartments and trailer parks but not in large fenced estates even if they are just as loud and violent because they weren't literally heard.
pessimizer 6y ago
If your response to a set of data showing areas where arrests have occurred in the past is to police those areas more, there is no doubt that in the future there will be more arrests in those same areas.
- timy2shoes 6y ago
  Exactly. Biases in previous data will be amplified with predictive policing algorithms. See, for example, https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...
coronadisaster 6y ago
But somehow, their budget always increases...

catalogia 6y ago

If they inaccurately predict where crime will occur, their recommendations could cause an elevated number of patrols in some neighborhoods.

retortio 6y ago
And if they accurately predict where crime will occur, they will reduce crime in those neighborhoods. It's likely that they would be able to get good results.
- catalogia 6y ago
  > And if they accurately predict where crime will occur That's a very big "if"

lawnchair_larry 6y ago

Nothing that these people are doing makes sense or demonstrates any capacity for forethought.

eplanit 6y ago
It demonstrates an extreme and irrational fear of thoughtcrime, though.
sudosysgen 6y ago
There are very good reasons why proactive policing leads to bad outcomes. You could read up on that before. Predicting where you will need to send patrols is proactive policing.

uoaei 6y ago

I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie.

mindcrime 6y ago
On that note, I encourage everyone to read more PKD in general. You can't go (too) wrong reading any of his stuff. Valis is pretty f'in weird, but still harmless. I think.
nickff 6y ago
The book ("The Minority Report") and the movie have radically different messages.
retortio 6y ago
That's like telling someone planning on getting their driver's license to watch The Fast and the Furious as if it has any relation to actual driving anyone encounters.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> I urge you to read Minority Report, or watch the movie. This is fiction.
- munk-a 6y ago
  Fiction is a really powerful tool that can be used to warn us of societal dangers while sparing us actually needing to live through them. It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen. Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
  - chrisseaton 6y ago

mindcrime 6y ago

I would agree with that, if we lived in the futuristic utopian society of Star Trek:TNG. But our world appears to be closer to a cyberpunk dystopia, where you can't trust the powers-that-be to use that kind of technology for good, peaceful, and just ends. Instead, they'll use it to advance their own greed and hate fueled agendas, and to perpetuate existing structural biases.

qntty 6y ago

People in high crime neighborhoods rightly regard the police as the enemy, because the police treat them as the enemy. Giving the enemy better intel is never desirable.

sudosysgen 6y ago

Except this is not how it works. We are not accurately predicting where crimes will occur, but maximizing the amounts of arrests. Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on. Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year. Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.

gloryofman 6y ago
Not all crime is equal, and to present crime as purely a dollar value is a bit disingenuous. Wage theft is important, and isn't pursued nearly enough, but it isn't on the same level as violent crime, which happens primarily in disadvantaged communities. Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.
oh_sigh 6y ago
The 'proactive' is just driving or walking around a neighborhood. It isn't (necessarily) doing things like stop and frisk or just going around accosting random people on the street.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  It's not just driving or walking around a neighbourhood, it's doing your best to find the maximum amount of crime. Otherwise, you wouldn't need mathematical models in order to optimize the "efficacity" of the operation. The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective (targeted assassinations, for example), or the police isn't being called because the victim thinks it will make the situation worse. Which in many cases is true, and I think fixing that problem would be a good step to take.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jfengel 6y ago

Not if the patrols they are sending have been taught to see all of the people in those places as targets. Police can literally make things worse. Even the victims of crime often don't want police there. This has been known in those communities for decades. It's only the most obvious, well-documented brutality that has begun to make other people aware of it. It's the broad reaction to that brutality, where other police and their strongest supporters reflexively excuse the inexcusable, that have made people like these mathematicians realize that sending the police doesn't solve the problems that their models are pinpointing. If the mathematicians want to help people, they'll model the broader causes of poverty, injustice, and inequality. Then we can try to solve the real problems, rather than "I heard there was a problem, let's send in people with guns until it gets better."

oh_sigh 6y ago
The victim's desires for police involvement is usually not very relevant. The victim can not provide any information to the police, but that doesn't mean that the police can't or shouldn't do anything. Respecting the victim's wishes is basically giving tacic approval of spousal abuse and honor killings.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  You don't fix spousal abuse nor honour killing by sending police to arrest people in poor neighbourhood. You fix spousal abuse by social interventions and honour killing by targeted response combined with social interventions.
  - devtul 6y ago
    Are you saying that the visible presence of the police won't stop any type of crime, or just specifically your spousal abuse example?
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      In general physical presence of police helps crime in the short term, but not in the media to long term, instead it likely makes it worse. The spousal abuse example wasn't mine, but the GP's.

bena 6y ago

But if we put the wrong numbers in, we won't get the right numbers out. This sort of prediction depends on the data being good. That's not a given. Even the crime statistics are problematic. There is an issue with certain groups getting treated differently in arrests and convictions. So you could have an area that doesn't have much crime reported because when crime happens it's not reported as crime. Whereas you can have other areas that have a lot more crime reported because there is less leniency given to the population.

bonoboTP 6y ago

The problem is, as someone in the field of AI, I can see how much overhyped low-quality products are sold to stakeholders believing they are getting a human-like or godlike artificially intelligent thing, when it's just a bunch of linear regressions or multilayer perceptrons operating on unsanitized data without proper evaluations or misleading numbers in the marketing, careless ways of separating training and test data etc. I think what the article says is likely to be true. It's a scientific cover-your-ass label for the high-ups to be able to do whatever they want and justify it. Similar to how CEOs bring in external consultants and pay them fat money so the CEOs can now do whatever they wanted originally, but now with Big Consulting Firm's stamp of approval. You can make these "AI" models skew to the direction you want. Just as it is with statistics and p-hacking, only that the machine learning community is even less versed in confidence values and is just generally less mature in terms of best practices as it's a newer field. And absolutely researchers should pay attention to who they work for and where the money comes from. Fundamental research is one thing, working on general AI is useful for all human endeavors just like working on energy efficiency or better cars. It's a necessary part of life that bad actors have benefits from a tide raising all ships. But it's not the same when directly working on a project for a bad actor. Similar to how Google engineers stood up against military projects or serving the Chinese censoring machine, it is important for mathematicians and computer scientists to consider whether they are building something unethical. These are professionals, intellectuals who have more responsibility than lower paid workers. We cannot blame the cleaning personnel or the cooks at the police canteen in the same way. It is part of one's civic duty as an intellectual to reflect upon one's societal role and impact. Again, this is not about fundamental research, that might be used for evil purposes. It's about directly working for corrupt organizations. Whether the police in general (or which specific levels or branches) is corrupt enough to refuse working for them and how much worse they are compared to big corporations is hard for me to judge from Europe. But it's certainly something that people working for them should reflect on and make a moral choice because they are the ones who see what they actually work on. There are many places for mathematicians and computer scientists to work at and so they have the luxury to follow their conscience. And all this also applies to intelligence agencies, like the NSA and others as well.

pizza 6y ago

There is a contradiction in expecting an organization that enhances its capabilities to use its capabilities less. Not that predicting where crimes will occur is really a thing - more likely you are just predicting where a population is getting policed.

Nasrudith 6y ago
It holds on the assumption of preventative power from those capabilities. Communicable diseases are a good example of a context - if everyone was treated for say tuberculosis with increased capacity then the number of cases would stay down vs just 'stabilizing" the numbers. See nuclear weaponry for an example of declining use. Deterrence and deescalation are where predictive policing could theoretically be useful but in practice it is often just bias laundering or reinforcing their tautologies. Looking at the "wrong side of the tracks" more and the arrest rates will climb there even if crime is actually lower there - let alone confounding variables. Like say the police being called in domestic disputes by witnesses in thin walled apartments and trailer parks but not in large fenced estates even if they are just as loud and violent because they weren't literally heard.

pessimizer 6y ago

If your response to a set of data showing areas where arrests have occurred in the past is to police those areas more, there is no doubt that in the future there will be more arrests in those same areas.

timy2shoes 6y ago
Exactly. Biases in previous data will be amplified with predictive policing algorithms. See, for example, https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-...

coronadisaster 6y ago

But somehow, their budget always increases...