3 ms·

I'd be curious to see how the software accounts for a self-fulfilling prophecy of "you always find what you are looking for".

• chippy 6y ago
  For policing if you are looking for "what areas have most violent street crime" - if for are actually looking for those areas to devote resources to and you use actual data, then you will devote resources to areas which suffer actual violent street crime. if instead of using actual data and finding what you are looking for - the alternative is using reports from the population (unless theres some other metric you would like to use? tweets?) And this means that richer and more privileged people will report more as they have 1) more confidence and trust in the police 2) more resources to lose from criminals 3)cultural reasons, and in their own areas which means that you will devote resources to areas which have the more reports and more attention from the police. This is basically how policing worked before 25 years ago. There is a very big, clear, and obvious reason why using data to base policing decisions on is better than using no data at all, especially as most people will think that the police has inherent biases. Data can remove biases