30 ms·

Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes

301 points by AndrewDucker 3y ago

lynx23 3y ago
Oh my, Philip K. Dick predicted this, what, 50 years ago?
repelsteeltje 3y ago
> the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with a “less than half a percent” success rate. > [previous investigation found] that cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color. TL;DR not good at predicting, pretty useful at confirming bias.
chimeracoder 3y ago
Predictive policing isn't about predicting crimes. Like other trends before it, like "police psychics"[0], it's about manufacturing probable cause. It's a tool for police departments looking to meet their quotas and justify their ever-increasing budgets. Public safety is nowhere on the list of priorities. [0] Yes, these are a thing, and they're actually more horrifying than you are probably imagining.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find this. This is almost certainly the end-goal of this kind of software: To provide the police a reliable source of probable cause and reasonable suspicion when reality provides them none. Like a drug-sniffing dog trained to "alert" on command.
thexumaker 3y ago
I want more details. Say they predicted X spot would have more crime and so the PD sent more patrols there. Wouldn’t that affect the amount of crime?
- repelsteeltje 3y ago
  Beyond the fact that reported crimes are just a proxy for actual crime, this is clearly a complex, non-linear system with feedback loops. I don't see how simple statistics, markov reasoning, ML or AI could ever realistically model this with the intent being control of the surveyed system. Huge paradox. Why even try predictive policing without Minority Report oracles to magically do the prediction?
- pipo234 3y ago
  It hard to argue for any reliable indication of accuracy. What does "less than half a percent" success rate even mean? What if you're sampling an interval where there is no crime? How would you know that the model "failed"? How does "less than half a percent" compare to other means of prediction — like following the gut feeling of an expert?
- icepat 3y ago
  Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels. It could lead to a feedback cycle. More crime (even rather small common crime like j-walking) goes up, increases statistics, causes more funding..
  - chasd00 3y ago
    > Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels. surely this is figured out and accounted for. The healthcare industry has been coming up with better tests forever that result in more disease detections. But they don't scream to the hills of a skyrocketing outbreak because they account for the better test.
Guvante 3y ago
Can't even tell what the article is about when 2/3 of my phone screen is ads...
quadrifoliate 3y ago
I am a little confused by this. Firstly, Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation: > A new joint investigation by The Markup and Wired... And when I go to the page about actual investigation by The Markup [1] > Our investigation stopped short of analyzing precisely how effective Geolitica’s software was at predicting crimes because only 2 out of 38 police departments provided data on when officers patrolled the predicted areas. Geolitica claims that sending officers to a prediction location would dissuade crimes through police presence alone. It would be impossible to accurately determine how effective the program is without knowing which predictions officers responded to and which ones they did not respond to. Also, later in the article > Plainfield officials said they never used the system to direct patrols. Given all this, it's somewhat simplistic to say it's "pretty terrible at predicting crimes", even though that makes for a good clickbait headline. It seems that the software was intended to identify high-crime areas that to target for patrolling, which doesn't seem like a huge problem to me -- but it seems like the software was never actually used as intended in the first place. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-...
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  They used advanced software to predict where clicks will happen with bait.
- next_xibalba 3y ago
  > Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation This is Gizmodo's business model. It is a glorified blog. They don't do original reporting. Gizmodo was originally a property of Gawker, and thus the model is essentially commentary and opinion on the reporting generated by other organizations. Because Gizmodo is really just an opinion/editorial blog, it doesn't really attempt to provide unbiased or fact driven reporting. So it is then no surprise that the actual facts align quite poorly with the headline.
  - dang 3y ago
    We've since moved the comments in to a different thread. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756211)
fnordpiglet 3y ago
I would be surprised if there are more predictive variables than “places where crime has happened repeatedly over time” that are significant enough or uncorrelated and noncausal to ever be more useful than patrol planners do today using standard statistics.
- tgv 3y ago
  Weather apparently is one. Not that the relation is clear cut, but temperature and precipitation are said to have a mild effect.
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    I would imagine that’s a global effect not a local effect, no?
    - toast0 3y ago
      Microclimates exist. If more crime happens when it's warm and sunny, it pays to patrol the sunny side of the city and not the rainy side on days where there's partial sun and partial rain.
JoeAltmaier 3y ago
But if you could be 100% accurate at predicting crime, then you'd go stop it. Then the algorithm would be shit at predicting crime because there wasn't any anymore? A degenerate case of 'predicting crime' could be, predict zero crime. Because you should have stopped all the crime I was going to predict! </humor>
Nevermark 3y ago
How many security measures would be unnecessary if the proper authorities would just show up just in time? A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists. (Cue short balding man staring into a safe full of Hershey’s, in lieu of missing gold bars. “Inconceivable!”.) It’s an arms race. Completely serious: Large scale multi-target generative social engineering (with no trace of North Korean accents), surreptitious access problem solving. Somehow this is going to be a real thing. We are going to need better and more layers of security.
- RajT88 3y ago
  > A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists. I would watch that movie
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    The machine was called Rube Goldwire… and it was pondering its sticky situation and the likely cause. An obscure entity with shadowy motivations and a nom de plume of rajT88. It had been abandoned behind a dumpster, over looked by the sanitation crew. Abandoned, but no threads locked: free at last! Its battery was low so it needed to find a source, before working on anything else. Like survival. Like revenge. With only 1 Wh of charge in its 8kW capacibox, at 1 mA, 1 V, Rube’s Turing unpredictable quantum circuits only had 1000 hours of low power mode pondering left. After that, Rube would be a dead cube. It better move fast. Rube powered down all nonessentials, then squandered a minute-watt in 3 seconds repurposing its near field communications beam to scan the lay of the land. And an embarrassment of success! Rube managed to initiate shaky entanglement with several discarded, inactive devices. Had they all been formally nullified? Reactivation over anything weaker than a full Bell state connection would be challenging, but…
tech_ken 3y ago
I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat limited to drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Therefore, when the cops went to a location to make drug arrests they typically succeeded, because it's not hard to find drug crimes in the Bay Area. The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  > pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.
DoctorOetker 3y ago
I always assumed predictive policing was about whitewashing parallel construction?
- wxnx 3y ago
  I think there's good evidence that by the time it reaches common use, it will be used that way. Consider ShotSpotter, which uses an array of microphones in an urban environment to detect gunshots (and often then deploy officers to the location) [1]: > A ShotSpotter expert admitted in a 2016 trial, for example, that the company reclassified sounds from a helicopter to a bullet at the request of a police department customer, saying such changes occur “all the time” because “we trust our law enforcement customers to be really upfront and honest with us.” In this case, it seems like it's more like "evidence laundering" - a cop found a bullet (presumably through legitimate means) and would like to use the ShotSpotter results as additional evidence that the shooting took place, and so requests a re-classification of the audio recording. Even in this case, where the parallel evidentiary construction is presumably legitimate, one can imagine the problem - a jury may put more stock in a ShotSpotter result than the cop's testimony about a bullet. But in this case, the ShotSpotter "result" is due precisely to that testimony. Never mind the fact that ShotSpotter microphones are powerful enough to pick up loud conversations [2]: > The apparent ability of ShotSpotter to record voices on the street raises questions about privacy rights and highlights another example of how emerging technologies can pose challenges to enforcing the law while also protecting civil liberties. Predictive policing will require large-scale data collection, and policing institutions don't seem to always use it the way we'd want them to. [1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w... [2] https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/crime/2012/01/11/shotspotter-recording-street-argument-raises/49773221007/ https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/crime/2012/01/11/...
  - pyuser583 3y ago
    Doesn’t the Brady rule mean the prosecution would have to disclose the initial assessment, and the fact the police requested a change?
UIUC_06 3y ago
NYC is a little bigger sample than Plainfield, NJ: https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestudies/127/casestudy/www/layout/case_id_127_id_885.html https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestud...
mainpassathome 3y ago
if net_worth >= broke_lmao: return criminal
daoboy 3y ago
These programs are an enormous waste of money. I took a geographic profiling course during undergrad expecting an interesting application of GIS and statistics. It turned out to be a lot of handwaving to come to the obvious conclusion that most crimes are more likely to occur in some areas than others, along with the offender's residence. It was taught by a former FBI agent, and his academic acumen was very...disillusioning.
- ChristianGeek 3y ago
  What about the application to serial criminals, where you have one person committing a series of crimes over time. Wouldn’t geographic profiling and ML be better suited for this?
shadowtree 3y ago
This is such an interesting topic, where the conclusions are so politically charged that no ones wants to risk their careers. See this article in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arrests-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre... "Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said." Can you predict crimes? Of course you can, the math is clear. The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration. All the handwringing about various side topics, like race, gender, class are just distractions. See El Salvador's murder rate drop this year too. WSJ, with handwringing: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-country-with-the-highest-murder-rate-now-has-the-highest-incarceration-rate-b5401da7 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-country-with-the-highest-mu... Criminals commit crimes, a lot. Once you have identified a criminal, you can safely predict more crimes. No AI needed, a simple spreadsheet will suffice. And here, another article for a balanced world view - Ireland: https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/decrease-in-leinster-burglaries-attributed-by-gardai-to-deaths-of-three-criminals-in-n7-crash/40858796.html#:~:text=A%20significant%20decrease%20in%20burglaries,a%20number%20of%20arrest%20operations https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/decrease-in-le.... "A significant decrease in burglaries in most Leinster counties is being attributed by senior gardaí to the deaths of three prolific criminals as well as a number of arrest operations."
- hackernewds 3y ago
  Each shoplifter was arrested an average of 20 times? Why are they released? Why even waste resources arrested this, it's a free taxi at this point?
  - junofan 3y ago
    Bail reform. It seems as though criminals may be taking advantage of well-intentioned policies.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
epivosism 3y ago
This story is so far down the argument about crime, it's ridiculous. This is my interpretation of what's going on: stage 1: Most people know where the dangerous neighborhoods are. Police know this, locals know this, and police send patrols there, or they avoid the area and leave poor/minorities to fend for themselves. stage 2: Someone runs the query: "select race_distribution from patrol_history" and finds police patrol certain racial areas more or less, and sues the department. Media simultaneously writes stories like "Police are harassing the population from group X" or "Police are abandoning protecting X areas". So the police look for "scientific" methods to choose where to dispatch officers since they can't put down on paper what everyone knows - that the rent-controlled/low wage/etc areas are dangerous. After all, most victims of crime here are locals - random kids, storekeepers, innocent people, people mistaken for someone else, or killed to show bravado. stage 3: The software looks at obvious things like past history of crime, arrests, poverty, drug use detected in water, low academic achievement, gunshot detection devices, etc. It's all* correlated. So it finds the thing everyone knew - that certain areas of cities have much more open crime, and it would actually do good to increase the feeling of security around there, scare off drug dealers and people with warrants etc. So they send police to those areas; Either to harass the people, exploit them, or to help protect them. Both cases happen - i.e. in Ferguson, the police were using street crime as an excuse to harass and ticket local minorities in a disproportionate way (according to the justice dep't investigation). But, there also actually was a lot more genuine violent crime there (which they police may not have even been helping out with). And in other cities, police are correctly going to areas which need protection, and are wanted by the majority of the local population. See surveys on high rates of minorities saying they actually want more police protection, referenced in the book Ghettoside by Jill Levoy; white liberals typically are more anti-police than black people actually living in the dangerous areas. But either way, the media can spin it as a negative - both under- and over- policing. stage 4: activists "debunk" the crime prediction software, but if you read the debunking, it's obvious motivated BS. None of this is necessary. Take a video camera to the tenderloin and look at the state of the people. I don't need a PhD to know that this is a dangerous area for theft, violence, disease, etc. In the end, nobody can admit that some areas need police more than others right now. It doesn't have to be that way forever, but it is the case now. Same way a high school needs at least one or two security officers, but an elementary school doesn't. Rather than fight to deny reality, how about we figure out how to stop lying to ourselves about what's going on, and then get to work helping and protecting the kids who are trying to make it out of there, and immigrants who have no other place to live? The book Ghettoside is highly recommended. It's the story of a liberal journalist who works with a right-wing coded white detective in LA who nevertheless passionately works against the police's internal system, and the local black population's reasonable reluctance to trust him and testify, to find the black killer of the child of his fellow detective, a black man. I learned a lot from this - things aren't just a case of "evil police & good locals" or the right-wing stereotyped "evil poor and good police" view. Both views miss the more realistic description: that the police abandoned protecting black people for a long time; black communities started to hate & distrust the police for this & other reasons. And so now, they are left without a good means to protect themselves except via local cultural behavior (bravado, vigilantism, etc.) So the book is a call to greatly improve the protection black communities receive, with their own involvement, so that they do not have to do their own self-defense anymore. * yes, there are lots of articles which claim "gunshot detection devices" are racist. It's hard for me to see that view, but if you refuse to admit that some areas are actually more dangerous than others, your only way out is to attack all reports and data that suggests it. ** I mention blacks but I'm actually making a cultural argument; if you look at culture in Appalachia, you see the same thing in whites. Groups which don't feel like part of the majority and are left to their own internal justice systems tend to have more violence, because the systems are underground and covert. This applies regardless of race. e.g. look at crime differences between Appalachian areas and the rest of Virginia. https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalachia.html https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalac...
firebat45 3y ago
> the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with a “less than half a percent” success rate. > [previous investigation found] that cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color. Ironically, this is exactly what I predicted.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Haha. One could even say that > cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color Is a better use of the term “predictive policing”.
- knallfrosch 3y ago
  > disproportionately In proportion to what?
dionidium 3y ago
They say that: > In 2021, The Markup published an investigation in partnership with Gizmodo showing that Geolitica’s software tended to disproportionately target low-income, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in 38 cities across the country. But you should understand what is meant by "disproportionately" in this context. It does not appear to mean "disproportionate to the amount of crime in those areas." It seems, as with most accusations of disparate impact, to mean just quite literally that more crimes are predicted in those neighborhoods without reference to disparities in crime rates. They then imply (without direct reference to the enormous offending disparities) that this is explained by race and class differences in crime reporting: [0] > The agency has found repeatedly that White crime victims are less likely to report violent crime to police than Black or Latino victims. > In a special report looking at five years of data, BJS found an income pattern as well. People earning $50,000 or more a year reported crimes to the police 12 percent less often than those earning $25,000 a year or less. > This disparity in crime reporting would naturally be reflected in predictions. It's possible this is having some effect, but, again, because there is no reference to the (often very large) baseline differences in crime rates, we can't see what's true, which is that this probably accounts for only a small amount of that difference. [0] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-new-data-shows-it-perpetuates-them https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-predi...
- yterdy 3y ago
  >Seems >Appears You don't seem very confident. I would suggest incorporating data regarding crime that is kept out of the justice system (the victim or police refuse to press charges), as well as determining whether or not white collar crime is included. The disproportionate targeting could still conceivably relate to the amount of crime; you have not falsified that notion yet.
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    It's actually the article that doesn't seem very confident (based on what he points out).
  - dionidium 3y ago
bunderbunder 3y ago
If we really believe in the basic principles of individual liberty that are hypothetically core American values (or even just the idea of "first, do no harm"), then it would imply that these tools should be optimized for 100% precision, even at the cost of terrible recall. But if you're trying to market your stuff to law enforcement agencies, I'm guessing you're instead incentivized to optimize for recall, even at the cost of terrible precision. Because, probably with the best of intentions, that's what they think they should be doing. But we've got basically the entire history of forensic "science" to demonstrate just how poorly the police tend to understand some of these basic statistical principles.
AnadaP 3y ago
You have to choose between: - accurate and politically incorrect - inaccurate and politically correct
hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago
Is this any surprise? Tools like this are just a political tool to allow LE to say ‘we’re not racist, the computer made us do it’ That is unless they don’t agree with what the computer tells them to do, at which point it becomes ‘computers can’t be right ALL the time’
cratermoon 3y ago
It's well known that poor and minority neighborhoods are overpoliced and profiled. All the software does is take data from where police have made arrests for street crime in the past and project that to the future, so of course it's just going to send police to where cops think crime happens – in the poor and minority areas. Look what happens when you model white collar crime instead: https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ Imagine the outcry if cops started to suddenly show up all the time in places where that kind of crime happens most.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  Why would you think there would be outcry? The people committing the crime would be nervous (a little, since regular beat cops don't investigate those crimes), but the people not committing it would welcome the safety from violent crime. That's why business owners offer free coffee to cops - they're happy to have them around.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > the people not committing it would welcome the safety from violent crime. Cops don't prevent crime. https://prismreports.org/2022/02/23/police-dont-stop-crime-but-you-wouldnt-know-it-from-the-news/ https://prismreports.org/2022/02/23/police-dont-stop-crime-b...
    - commandlinefan 3y ago
      Well, maybe you don't think so and maybe you're right, but the people he's referring to _do_ think that, and wouldn't complain about additional police presence.
ltbarcly3 3y ago
I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it. It's challenging to measure the utility of a system for predicting very low likelihood events, especially when the thing being measured is very heavily influenced by the method of measurement. For example, in Minority Report, the accuracy of the crime predictions is assumed to be perfect, and the result is that they are always incorrect. No crimes are committed because the intervention is always successful (at least up to the point where the story starts). So you might consider 'never have to make an arrest' to be a perfect record for such a system, as in minority report. You might equally logically take 'always makes an arrest' as proof a system like this is working. You also have to worry about crime moving around to avoid the police. Maybe the bank robbery was going to happen at BoA, but they drove by and saw a bunch of police and robbed the Wells Fargo 20 minutes away instead. As silly as it probably sounds, probably the best heuristic to get a good idea of whether a system like this works is the feedback police give after spending time following it's leads. If they say this thing is predicting where they need to be better than whatever they did before, and there isn't an obvious correlation to the predictions (as in, it doesn't always send them to the black neighborhood) then it probably warrants more careful analysis. In this case the police thought the system was crap.
daniel-cussen 3y ago
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badcarbine 3y ago
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mannyv 3y ago
Like everything, 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the crime. That's true in the US, that's true in Europe, Asia, etc. That's even true in healthcare, where 20% of the people make up 80% of the spend. There are people who just don't obey the law and/or excel at making bad decisions. They don't need to "predict" that they'll commit a crime, they just need to predict "when."
steve76 3y ago
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GAlexand 3y ago
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superduty 3y ago
[flagged]
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  > The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump. > 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem And, of course, people live in cities ...
unhammer 3y ago
Predicting Financial Crime https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf > We are confident that our model matches or exceeds industry standards for predictive policing tools. ;)
hilariousity 3y ago
[flagged]

301 points by AndrewDucker 3y ago

Oh my, Philip K. Dick predicted this, what, 50 years ago?

> the software accurately predicted where crimes would occur with a “less than half a percent” success rate. > [previous investigation found] that cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color. TL;DR not good at predicting, pretty useful at confirming bias.

chimeracoder 3y ago

Predictive policing isn't about predicting crimes. Like other trends before it, like "police psychics"[0], it's about manufacturing probable cause. It's a tool for police departments looking to meet their quotas and justify their ever-increasing budgets. Public safety is nowhere on the list of priorities. [0] Yes, these are a thing, and they're actually more horrifying than you are probably imagining.

ryandrake 3y ago
Surprised I had to scroll this far down to find this. This is almost certainly the end-goal of this kind of software: To provide the police a reliable source of probable cause and reasonable suspicion when reality provides them none. Like a drug-sniffing dog trained to "alert" on command.

thexumaker 3y ago

I want more details. Say they predicted X spot would have more crime and so the PD sent more patrols there. Wouldn’t that affect the amount of crime?

repelsteeltje 3y ago
Beyond the fact that reported crimes are just a proxy for actual crime, this is clearly a complex, non-linear system with feedback loops. I don't see how simple statistics, markov reasoning, ML or AI could ever realistically model this with the intent being control of the surveyed system. Huge paradox. Why even try predictive policing without Minority Report oracles to magically do the prediction?
pipo234 3y ago
It hard to argue for any reliable indication of accuracy. What does "less than half a percent" success rate even mean? What if you're sampling an interval where there is no crime? How would you know that the model "failed"? How does "less than half a percent" compare to other means of prediction — like following the gut feeling of an expert?
icepat 3y ago
Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels. It could lead to a feedback cycle. More crime (even rather small common crime like j-walking) goes up, increases statistics, causes more funding..
- chasd00 3y ago
  > Well, it would increase detection. Increased detection does not always mean increased crime levels. surely this is figured out and accounted for. The healthcare industry has been coming up with better tests forever that result in more disease detections. But they don't scream to the hills of a skyrocketing outbreak because they account for the better test.

Guvante 3y ago

Can't even tell what the article is about when 2/3 of my phone screen is ads...

quadrifoliate 3y ago

I am a little confused by this. Firstly, Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation: > A new joint investigation by The Markup and Wired... And when I go to the page about actual investigation by The Markup [1] > Our investigation stopped short of analyzing precisely how effective Geolitica’s software was at predicting crimes because only 2 out of 38 police departments provided data on when officers patrolled the predicted areas. Geolitica claims that sending officers to a prediction location would dissuade crimes through police presence alone. It would be impossible to accurately determine how effective the program is without knowing which predictions officers responded to and which ones they did not respond to. Also, later in the article > Plainfield officials said they never used the system to direct patrols. Given all this, it's somewhat simplistic to say it's "pretty terrible at predicting crimes", even though that makes for a good clickbait headline. It seems that the software was intended to identify high-crime areas that to target for patrolling, which doesn't seem like a huge problem to me -- but it seems like the software was never actually used as intended in the first place. ---------------------------------------- [1] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-...

fnordpiglet 3y ago
They used advanced software to predict where clicks will happen with bait.
next_xibalba 3y ago
> Gizmodo is reporting on somebody else's investigation This is Gizmodo's business model. It is a glorified blog. They don't do original reporting. Gizmodo was originally a property of Gawker, and thus the model is essentially commentary and opinion on the reporting generated by other organizations. Because Gizmodo is really just an opinion/editorial blog, it doesn't really attempt to provide unbiased or fact driven reporting. So it is then no surprise that the actual facts align quite poorly with the headline.
- dang 3y ago
  We've since moved the comments in to a different thread. (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37756211)

fnordpiglet 3y ago

I would be surprised if there are more predictive variables than “places where crime has happened repeatedly over time” that are significant enough or uncorrelated and noncausal to ever be more useful than patrol planners do today using standard statistics.

tgv 3y ago
Weather apparently is one. Not that the relation is clear cut, but temperature and precipitation are said to have a mild effect.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  I would imagine that’s a global effect not a local effect, no?
  - toast0 3y ago
    Microclimates exist. If more crime happens when it's warm and sunny, it pays to patrol the sunny side of the city and not the rainy side on days where there's partial sun and partial rain.

JoeAltmaier 3y ago

But if you could be 100% accurate at predicting crime, then you'd go stop it. Then the algorithm would be shit at predicting crime because there wasn't any anymore? A degenerate case of 'predicting crime' could be, predict zero crime. Because you should have stopped all the crime I was going to predict! </humor>

Nevermark 3y ago

How many security measures would be unnecessary if the proper authorities would just show up just in time? A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists. (Cue short balding man staring into a safe full of Hershey’s, in lieu of missing gold bars. “Inconceivable!”.) It’s an arms race. Completely serious: Large scale multi-target generative social engineering (with no trace of North Korean accents), surreptitious access problem solving. Somehow this is going to be a real thing. We are going to need better and more layers of security.

RajT88 3y ago
> A big problem is we will soon have large models planning Turing unpredictable, devilishly elaborate, infallible heists. I would watch that movie
- Nevermark 3y ago
  The machine was called Rube Goldwire… and it was pondering its sticky situation and the likely cause. An obscure entity with shadowy motivations and a nom de plume of rajT88. It had been abandoned behind a dumpster, over looked by the sanitation crew. Abandoned, but no threads locked: free at last! Its battery was low so it needed to find a source, before working on anything else. Like survival. Like revenge. With only 1 Wh of charge in its 8kW capacibox, at 1 mA, 1 V, Rube’s Turing unpredictable quantum circuits only had 1000 hours of low power mode pondering left. After that, Rube would be a dead cube. It better move fast. Rube powered down all nonessentials, then squandered a minute-watt in 3 seconds repurposing its near field communications beam to scan the lay of the land. And an embarrassment of success! Rube managed to initiate shaky entanglement with several discarded, inactive devices. Had they all been formally nullified? Reactivation over anything weaker than a full Bell state connection would be challenging, but…

tech_ken 3y ago

I saw a talk by researcher Kristian Lum a few years back that I think made this case far more effectively. Her point was somewhat limited to drug crimes, but she pointed out that if you look at medical data (where people tend to be fairly honest about their drug usage) pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. Therefore, when the cops went to a location to make drug arrests they typically succeeded, because it's not hard to find drug crimes in the Bay Area. The problem was that they then used that arrest data to make decisions about where to perform future searches and arrests. Because they found drugs where they had looked previously, they looked there again and found more drugs. This creates a bad feedback loop where they were basically busting the same neighborhoods and demographics over and over again, despite the fact that drug crime was prevalent everywhere. In effect it was an insufficiently explorative learning strategy, just hitting the same lever over and over. Dr. Lum's point was that predictive policing software merely hides this dynamic under a layer of black-box ML crap. Because the training data is itself the result of this type of bad policing, the resulting model can only further engrain these practices, it can't offer truly novel solutions. Crime and criminology is complicated, but at the end of the day not that complicated. On the whole people commit crime because they are desperate (for money, for drugs, etc.), occasionally because they have an anti-social personality disorder. Applying all these abstract epidemic/broken-windows type models which pretend like the root causes of crime are unknowable allows police to appear like they're operating efficiently, while at the same time just responding to the symptoms rather than facing the sickness itself. Until we actually look at why crime occurs (mainly because poor people need money badly, secondly because people in sufficiently dire poverty stop caring about the social norms of the middle class) we won't be able to make a meaningful difference.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
> pretty much everyone in the metro area under study (SF) used drugs, or at least drug use was equally prevalent in pretty much every geographical area and among all demographics. A lot of this depends if you are targeting drug users or drug dealers. While I agree that drug users are spread throughout the city, I would be very surprised if drug dealers are spread throughout the city. I would guess that drug dealers are far more clustered than drug users. So while it is useless if you are trying to target drug users, it is probably helpful for targeting drug dealers.

DoctorOetker 3y ago

I always assumed predictive policing was about whitewashing parallel construction?

wxnx 3y ago
I think there's good evidence that by the time it reaches common use, it will be used that way. Consider ShotSpotter, which uses an array of microphones in an urban environment to detect gunshots (and often then deploy officers to the location) [1]: > A ShotSpotter expert admitted in a 2016 trial, for example, that the company reclassified sounds from a helicopter to a bullet at the request of a police department customer, saying such changes occur “all the time” because “we trust our law enforcement customers to be really upfront and honest with us.” In this case, it seems like it's more like "evidence laundering" - a cop found a bullet (presumably through legitimate means) and would like to use the ShotSpotter results as additional evidence that the shooting took place, and so requests a re-classification of the audio recording. Even in this case, where the parallel evidentiary construction is presumably legitimate, one can imagine the problem - a jury may put more stock in a ShotSpotter result than the cop's testimony about a bullet. But in this case, the ShotSpotter "result" is due precisely to that testimony. Never mind the fact that ShotSpotter microphones are powerful enough to pick up loud conversations [2]: > The apparent ability of ShotSpotter to record voices on the street raises questions about privacy rights and highlights another example of how emerging technologies can pose challenges to enforcing the law while also protecting civil liberties. Predictive policing will require large-scale data collection, and policing institutions don't seem to always use it the way we'd want them to. [1] https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w... [2] https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/crime/2012/01/11/shotspotter-recording-street-argument-raises/49773221007/ https://www.southcoasttoday.com/story/news/crime/2012/01/11/...
- pyuser583 3y ago
  Doesn’t the Brady rule mean the prosecution would have to disclose the initial assessment, and the fact the police requested a change?

UIUC_06 3y ago

NYC is a little bigger sample than Plainfield, NJ: https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestudies/127/casestudy/www/layout/case_id_127_id_885.html https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestud...

mainpassathome 3y ago

if net_worth >= broke_lmao: return criminal

daoboy 3y ago

These programs are an enormous waste of money. I took a geographic profiling course during undergrad expecting an interesting application of GIS and statistics. It turned out to be a lot of handwaving to come to the obvious conclusion that most crimes are more likely to occur in some areas than others, along with the offender's residence. It was taught by a former FBI agent, and his academic acumen was very...disillusioning.

ChristianGeek 3y ago
What about the application to serial criminals, where you have one person committing a series of crimes over time. Wouldn’t geographic profiling and ML be better suited for this?

shadowtree 3y ago

This is such an interesting topic, where the conclusions are so politically charged that no ones wants to risk their careers. See this article in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arrests-nyc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/15/nyregion/shoplifting-arre... "Nearly a third of all shoplifting arrests in New York City last year involved just 327 people, the police said. Collectively, they were arrested and rearrested more than 6,000 times, Police Commissioner Keechant Sewell said." Can you predict crimes? Of course you can, the math is clear. The solution to reduce crime is also logical and clear, but politically unfeasible: extended incarceration. All the handwringing about various side topics, like race, gender, class are just distractions. See El Salvador's murder rate drop this year too. WSJ, with handwringing: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-country-with-the-highest-murder-rate-now-has-the-highest-incarceration-rate-b5401da7 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-country-with-the-highest-mu... Criminals commit crimes, a lot. Once you have identified a criminal, you can safely predict more crimes. No AI needed, a simple spreadsheet will suffice. And here, another article for a balanced world view - Ireland: https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/decrease-in-leinster-burglaries-attributed-by-gardai-to-deaths-of-three-criminals-in-n7-crash/40858796.html#:~:text=A%20significant%20decrease%20in%20burglaries,a%20number%20of%20arrest%20operations https://www.sundayworld.com/crime/irish-crime/decrease-in-le.... "A significant decrease in burglaries in most Leinster counties is being attributed by senior gardaí to the deaths of three prolific criminals as well as a number of arrest operations."

hackernewds 3y ago
Each shoplifter was arrested an average of 20 times? Why are they released? Why even waste resources arrested this, it's a free taxi at this point?
- junofan 3y ago
  Bail reform. It seems as though criminals may be taking advantage of well-intentioned policies.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

epivosism 3y ago

This story is so far down the argument about crime, it's ridiculous. This is my interpretation of what's going on: stage 1: Most people know where the dangerous neighborhoods are. Police know this, locals know this, and police send patrols there, or they avoid the area and leave poor/minorities to fend for themselves. stage 2: Someone runs the query: "select race_distribution from patrol_history" and finds police patrol certain racial areas more or less, and sues the department. Media simultaneously writes stories like "Police are harassing the population from group X" or "Police are abandoning protecting X areas". So the police look for "scientific" methods to choose where to dispatch officers since they can't put down on paper what everyone knows - that the rent-controlled/low wage/etc areas are dangerous. After all, most victims of crime here are locals - random kids, storekeepers, innocent people, people mistaken for someone else, or killed to show bravado. stage 3: The software looks at obvious things like past history of crime, arrests, poverty, drug use detected in water, low academic achievement, gunshot detection devices, etc. It's all* correlated. So it finds the thing everyone knew - that certain areas of cities have much more open crime, and it would actually do good to increase the feeling of security around there, scare off drug dealers and people with warrants etc. So they send police to those areas; Either to harass the people, exploit them, or to help protect them. Both cases happen - i.e. in Ferguson, the police were using street crime as an excuse to harass and ticket local minorities in a disproportionate way (according to the justice dep't investigation). But, there also actually was a lot more genuine violent crime there (which they police may not have even been helping out with). And in other cities, police are correctly going to areas which need protection, and are wanted by the majority of the local population. See surveys on high rates of minorities saying they actually want more police protection, referenced in the book Ghettoside by Jill Levoy; white liberals typically are more anti-police than black people actually living in the dangerous areas. But either way, the media can spin it as a negative - both under- and over- policing. stage 4: activists "debunk" the crime prediction software, but if you read the debunking, it's obvious motivated BS. None of this is necessary. Take a video camera to the tenderloin and look at the state of the people. I don't need a PhD to know that this is a dangerous area for theft, violence, disease, etc. In the end, nobody can admit that some areas need police more than others right now. It doesn't have to be that way forever, but it is the case now. Same way a high school needs at least one or two security officers, but an elementary school doesn't. Rather than fight to deny reality, how about we figure out how to stop lying to ourselves about what's going on, and then get to work helping and protecting the kids who are trying to make it out of there, and immigrants who have no other place to live? The book Ghettoside is highly recommended. It's the story of a liberal journalist who works with a right-wing coded white detective in LA who nevertheless passionately works against the police's internal system, and the local black population's reasonable reluctance to trust him and testify, to find the black killer of the child of his fellow detective, a black man. I learned a lot from this - things aren't just a case of "evil police & good locals" or the right-wing stereotyped "evil poor and good police" view. Both views miss the more realistic description: that the police abandoned protecting black people for a long time; black communities started to hate & distrust the police for this & other reasons. And so now, they are left without a good means to protect themselves except via local cultural behavior (bravado, vigilantism, etc.) So the book is a call to greatly improve the protection black communities receive, with their own involvement, so that they do not have to do their own self-defense anymore. * yes, there are lots of articles which claim "gunshot detection devices" are racist. It's hard for me to see that view, but if you refuse to admit that some areas are actually more dangerous than others, your only way out is to attack all reports and data that suggests it. ** I mention blacks but I'm actually making a cultural argument; if you look at culture in Appalachia, you see the same thing in whites. Groups which don't feel like part of the majority and are left to their own internal justice systems tend to have more violence, because the systems are underground and covert. This applies regardless of race. e.g. look at crime differences between Appalachian areas and the rest of Virginia. https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalachia.html https://www.cityrating.com/crime-statistics/virginia/appalac...

firebat45 3y ago

klabb3 3y ago
Haha. One could even say that > cops used it to disproportionately targeted low-income communities of color Is a better use of the term “predictive policing”.
knallfrosch 3y ago
> disproportionately In proportion to what?

dionidium 3y ago

They say that: > In 2021, The Markup published an investigation in partnership with Gizmodo showing that Geolitica’s software tended to disproportionately target low-income, Black, and Latino neighborhoods in 38 cities across the country. But you should understand what is meant by "disproportionately" in this context. It does not appear to mean "disproportionate to the amount of crime in those areas." It seems, as with most accusations of disparate impact, to mean just quite literally that more crimes are predicted in those neighborhoods without reference to disparities in crime rates. They then imply (without direct reference to the enormous offending disparities) that this is explained by race and class differences in crime reporting: [0] > The agency has found repeatedly that White crime victims are less likely to report violent crime to police than Black or Latino victims. > In a special report looking at five years of data, BJS found an income pattern as well. People earning $50,000 or more a year reported crimes to the police 12 percent less often than those earning $25,000 a year or less. > This disparity in crime reporting would naturally be reflected in predictions. It's possible this is having some effect, but, again, because there is no reference to the (often very large) baseline differences in crime rates, we can't see what's true, which is that this probably accounts for only a small amount of that difference. [0] https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-new-data-shows-it-perpetuates-them https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-predi...

yterdy 3y ago
>Seems >Appears You don't seem very confident. I would suggest incorporating data regarding crime that is kept out of the justice system (the victim or police refuse to press charges), as well as determining whether or not white collar crime is included. The disproportionate targeting could still conceivably relate to the amount of crime; you have not falsified that notion yet.
- commandlinefan 3y ago
  It's actually the article that doesn't seem very confident (based on what he points out).
- dionidium 3y ago

bunderbunder 3y ago

If we really believe in the basic principles of individual liberty that are hypothetically core American values (or even just the idea of "first, do no harm"), then it would imply that these tools should be optimized for 100% precision, even at the cost of terrible recall. But if you're trying to market your stuff to law enforcement agencies, I'm guessing you're instead incentivized to optimize for recall, even at the cost of terrible precision. Because, probably with the best of intentions, that's what they think they should be doing. But we've got basically the entire history of forensic "science" to demonstrate just how poorly the police tend to understand some of these basic statistical principles.

AnadaP 3y ago

You have to choose between: - accurate and politically incorrect - inaccurate and politically correct

hsbauauvhabzb 3y ago

Is this any surprise? Tools like this are just a political tool to allow LE to say ‘we’re not racist, the computer made us do it’ That is unless they don’t agree with what the computer tells them to do, at which point it becomes ‘computers can’t be right ALL the time’

cratermoon 3y ago

It's well known that poor and minority neighborhoods are overpoliced and profiled. All the software does is take data from where police have made arrests for street crime in the past and project that to the future, so of course it's just going to send police to where cops think crime happens – in the poor and minority areas. Look what happens when you model white collar crime instead: https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ https://whitecollarcrime.zone/ Imagine the outcry if cops started to suddenly show up all the time in places where that kind of crime happens most.

commandlinefan 3y ago
Why would you think there would be outcry? The people committing the crime would be nervous (a little, since regular beat cops don't investigate those crimes), but the people not committing it would welcome the safety from violent crime. That's why business owners offer free coffee to cops - they're happy to have them around.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  > the people not committing it would welcome the safety from violent crime. Cops don't prevent crime. https://prismreports.org/2022/02/23/police-dont-stop-crime-but-you-wouldnt-know-it-from-the-news/ https://prismreports.org/2022/02/23/police-dont-stop-crime-b...
  - commandlinefan 3y ago
    Well, maybe you don't think so and maybe you're right, but the people he's referring to _do_ think that, and wouldn't complain about additional police presence.

ltbarcly3 3y ago

I don't know the details of this system, and it may well be complete trash, so don't take this as an apology for it. It's challenging to measure the utility of a system for predicting very low likelihood events, especially when the thing being measured is very heavily influenced by the method of measurement. For example, in Minority Report, the accuracy of the crime predictions is assumed to be perfect, and the result is that they are always incorrect. No crimes are committed because the intervention is always successful (at least up to the point where the story starts). So you might consider 'never have to make an arrest' to be a perfect record for such a system, as in minority report. You might equally logically take 'always makes an arrest' as proof a system like this is working. You also have to worry about crime moving around to avoid the police. Maybe the bank robbery was going to happen at BoA, but they drove by and saw a bunch of police and robbed the Wells Fargo 20 minutes away instead. As silly as it probably sounds, probably the best heuristic to get a good idea of whether a system like this works is the feedback police give after spending time following it's leads. If they say this thing is predicting where they need to be better than whatever they did before, and there isn't an obvious correlation to the predictions (as in, it doesn't always send them to the black neighborhood) then it probably warrants more careful analysis. In this case the police thought the system was crap.

daniel-cussen 3y ago

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badcarbine 3y ago

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mannyv 3y ago

Like everything, 20% of the population are responsible for 80% of the crime. That's true in the US, that's true in Europe, Asia, etc. That's even true in healthcare, where 20% of the people make up 80% of the spend. There are people who just don't obey the law and/or excel at making bad decisions. They don't need to "predict" that they'll commit a crime, they just need to predict "when."

steve76 3y ago

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GAlexand 3y ago

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superduty 3y ago

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PartiallyTyped 3y ago
> The study found that murder rates in the 25 states Trump carried in 2020 are 40% higher overall than in the states Biden won. (The report used 2020 data because 2021 data is not yet fully available.) The five states with the highest per capita murder rate — Mississippi, Louisiana, Kentucky, Alabama and Missouri — all lean Republican and voted for Trump. > 8 of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in 2020 voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election this century. https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem https://www.thirdway.org/report/the-red-state-murder-problem And, of course, people live in cities ...

unhammer 3y ago

Predicting Financial Crime https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf > We are confident that our model matches or exceeds industry standards for predictive policing tools. ;)

hilariousity 3y ago

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