
Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. first - rbanffy
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-police-tech-trfn/california-city-bans-predictive-policing-in-u-s-first-idUSKBN23V2XC
======
bhntr3
The problem with predictive policing is in the name. Inference (ML) predicts
the future from the past. If the past is racist, then inference will create a
racist future. Since racism is systemic[1], especially when it comes to
policing, predictive policing is actively working against an anti-racist
future.

There may be statistical ways to factor out systemic racism. There are two
reasons I don't think that works:

1\. I don't see how one evaluates the correctness of the process that controls
for racism. What is ground truth for anti-racist policing?

2\. These systems are likely snake oil and the vendors of these systems are
(possibly inadvertently) profiting off racist policing. If cops arrest more
black people per capita, then send the cops to black neighborhoods and have
them follow black parolees. The system works (according to an objective
function which maximizes arrests.) Remove racism and send the cops to white
neighborhoods. Now the cops don't arrest as many people. The system fails. So
I think it's likely that if you remove racist policing from predictive
policing, you get the null hypothesis.

I'd be happy to hear a counterargument from someone who has actual statistics
on this though.

[1] If you don't believe this, you're in the minority now:
[https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-
protests...](https://www.vox.com/2020/6/11/21286642/george-floyd-protests-
white-people-police-racism)

~~~
alfalfasprout
I agree that, in general, you're going to have biased training data (with a
bias that's difficult to measure) and so inherently policing recommendations
will be biased. This is particularly problematic when it comes to arrests for
crimes that are inherently 'selective' in their enforcement. Eg; drug-related
crimes, public intoxication, loitering, trespassing.

But the fact is... violent (fatal and nonfatal) crimes do happen at a much
higher rate in poor neighborhoods. And black americans are calling the police
at higher rates knowing full-well what that might imply
[1]([https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf](https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf)).
Anecdotally, when I lived in south side Chicago, when speaking to residents
(that did not live in a predominantly affluent area like Hyde Park) one of the
key complaints was that there simply wasn't enough police to respond to
violent incidents.

There's a worrying trend in the conversation these days that has shifted from
"there's a serious problem with racism in how police go about their job" to
"we need less police". Folks in neighborhoods living with the constant threat
of gang violence don't have the luxury to sit in their aeron chairs and argue
about defunding the police. They face the very real threat of themselves or
their loved ones being shot on the streets and statistically not by police.

~~~
snowwrestler
If we want to stop neighborhood gang violence in the long term, we need to
work on why people join gangs, and what they are fighting over. We can't do
that with police, who generally don't come into the situation until after it's
too late and things have gone wrong.

But if most of our money is going to the police, then what resources are
available to do the longer-term work on gangs and neighborhoods?

In software development terms (since this is HN), it would be like spending
more and more money on QA and support because your products have so many
problems. At some point a wise manager is going to say "wait, we should invest
in better product development instead."

If you have infinite funding, you can do both. If you don't have infinite
funding, you need to look at changing your allocation.

~~~
Mirioron
The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a
cultural problem above all else.

People like blaming it on poverty and lack of education funding and all kinds
of other things. Yet compare former Soviet countries to the US. All of them
spend less on education than the US does. Their populations are likely poorer
than even the poor in the US. Their quality of life is lower, however, gangs
aren't as big of an issue because they're not allowed to fester. The culture
doesn't view gangs as something to aspire to. Being part of a gang isn't seen
as "cool" by large groups of people nor is failing in education.

I do agree that a lack of education and subsequent opportunities is a large
part of the problem, but it's probably not a lack of education funding that's
causing it. Learning simply isn't considered "cool" by a lot of people. This
puts them on a path with few opportunities, which leads to their kids having
fewer opportunities.

What makes all of this even worse is that prisons in the US are breeding
grounds for gangs. As long as things like that remain a part of society you
won't be getting rid of gangs no matter how much money you throw at education.

~~~
gotostatement
> The biggest reason why people join gangs is because they're there. It's a
> cultural problem above all else.

I'm going to challenge you to find a citation to back up this belief before
you continue going through life believing it, because it's a dangerous one,
rooted in ignorance, that causes racism.

~~~
mtrower
> that causes racism. Elaborate?

~~~
gotostatement
to say that the reason people join gangs is cultural implies that it's a "bad
culture" problem. the reality of why people join gangs is more complicated and
includes overpolicing, economic deprivation, legacies of slavery and racism,
and other factors. but if we say "it's just their culture" then we commit a
fallacy that leads us to say "black people are doing this to themselves
because of their bad qualities X,Y,Z", and we may also end up saying "black
people are poor and disenfranchised for the same bad culture problems as lead
them to form gangs". this is a classic fallacy, throughout human history, in
which oppressed groups of people have their character impugned based on
ignorant readings of the ways that they cope with and adapt to their
situation, and thus are blamed for their own oppression

------
godelski
Looking at all these comments, did no one watch _Minority Report_? The whole
film was about the difficulties and ethics of "precrime" and arresting people
before they even committed a crime. Obviously we aren't doing that here, but
stories often exaggerate a bit.

I'd also like to add another good series that explores this topic even more
than _Minority Report_ : _Psycho-Pass_. _Psycho-Pass_ is more extreme in that
there's stations setup that are constantly monitoring peoples' brain patterns
and trying to predict aggression. I think many draw parallels to mass
surveillance and some uses of ML for predictive crime detection.

Both these shows tackle ethical challenges related to policing in this manner
even when the predictive power is quite high.

~~~
basch
I like to bring Then Now up everytime precrime comes up. Until it goes off the
rails in the end, its one of my favorite articles of all time. The paragraphs
I yanked below, dont do its craziness justice.
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58)

"But the oddest is STATIC-99. It's a way of predicting whether sex offenders
are likely to commit crimes again after they have been released. In America
this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even after they have
served their full sentence.

STATIC-99 works by scoring individuals on criteria such as age, number of sex-
crimes and sex of the victim. These are then fed into a database that shows
recidivism rates of groups of sex-offenders in the past with similar
characteristics. The judge is then told how likely it is - in percentage terms
- that the offender will do it again.

The problem is that it is not true. What the judge is really being told is the
likely percentage of people in the group who will re-offend. There is no way
the system can predict what an individual will do. A recent very critical
report of such systems said that the margin of error for individuals could be
as great as between 5% and 95%

In other words completely useless. Yet people are being kept in prison on the
basis that such a system predicts they might do something bad in the future."

~~~
treis
The options here are having the judge make the decision based on their gut
feeling or they can make it based on data. It's really hard for me to believe
that gut feeling is better than data.

~~~
cgriswald
In both cases it doesn’t actually work. In the case of the data-backed
nonsense it’s been used to justify holding people past their prison sentence.
In this case it’s _demonstrably worse_. In the general case anything that’s
“sciency” but doesn’t actually work leads to bad outcomes because people are
far more likely to buy into it or at least less likely to call out obvious BS.

~~~
treis
>In the case of the data-backed nonsense it’s been used to justify holding
people past their prison sentence.

I'm not sure why you assume that it's keeping people in prison and not being
used to let them out.

~~~
a1369209993
From
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655017)
(your GGP) and supposedly originally
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7...](https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/78691781-c9b7-30a0-9a0a-3ff76e8bfe58)
:

> In America this is being used to decide whether to keep them in jail even
> after they have served their full sentence.

That may not be true, but the reason why they assume that is that basch and/or
the BBC _said_ that.

------
franksvalli
Just for the record, in 2011 Santa Cruz was proud to be the first in the US to
try predictive policing:

[https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2011/01/14/crime-
predictio...](https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2011/01/14/crime-predictions-
to-guide-santa-cruz-police-agency-says-it-will-be-first-in-nation-to-try-
santa-clara-university-model/)

[https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/06/20/santa-cruz-
cons...](https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/06/20/santa-cruz-considers-
first-move-at-police-reform/)

~~~
strbean
And somehow in this small sleepy town, the same 2 blocks have consistently
been the "you can always get heroine/meth/crack here" blocks for about 30
years, and they can't predict the need for a squad car parked there.

~~~
tpmx
So,

a) an incompetent or politically stymied police force

b) predictive policing from prior crime data works

~~~
socalnate1
This was a very clever comment, and I don't think most folks understood it.

~~~
concordDance
Enlighten us?

~~~
tpmx
Me too? (I was just summarizing.)

------
riazrizvi
> Used by police across the United States for almost a decade, predictive
> policing relies on algorithms to interpret police records, analyzing arrest
> or parole data to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying
> places where crime may occur.

The promise of the software made in a sales pitch or on the website, is a far
cry from the reality of what such software delivers. That's fine when it's
business, the cost of a mistake is a p&l hit. But here we are talking about
people's lives, far stricter processes should be in place, more similar to
getting approval for a new airplane or medicine. To be clear, predictive
policing is replacing detectives/experts with software, like a kind of robo-
policing, where decisions to investigate are generated by a system and handed
to cheaper uniformed police who lack the context behind the decision support
system they are now serving, because software becomes a black box.

Any consumer who has ever dealt with even state-of-the-art call centers, knows
that humans do a far better job at real-world operations.

This is a premature application of software.

~~~
tootie
NYC has used analytics since 1993 and it's widely credited as contributing to
the incredible drop in crime. I don't buy for a second that ending these kind
of programs will help anything. Certainly we can decrease brutality by sending
police into areas with no conflicts but that defeats the whole purpose of
policing. We need effective and aggressive law enforcement as much as ever. We
need to root out the worst abusers and show them that bad behavior will be
punished severely.

[https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/compstat-crime-
reduction...](https://www.innovations.harvard.edu/compstat-crime-reduction-
management-tool)

~~~
dv_dt
Crime rates nationally dropped also during the same time - and not all areas
had the same analytics. It's really not clear if the reductions were from the
NYC stats or in particular "agressive" law enforcement.

~~~
misja111
From the article that OP linked to:

"Since Compstat was introduced, crime rates in New York City have dropped
dramatically. From 1993 to 1995, the total crime rate declined 27.44 percent
across the city."

National crime rates dropped as well in that period but nowhere near 27%.

~~~
dv_dt
Seems like national stats maybe lagged NYC a little, but from a slightly
different range of 1994-2000 on this chart the drop was (eyballing) 35% for
homicides.

[https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/police-budget-
spe...](https://www.politico.com/interactives/2020/police-budget-spending-
george-floyd-defund/)

------
kadabra9
Honest question here.

Are these neighborhoods “over policed” because their residents commit more
crimes, or do the residents commit more crimes because their neighborhood is
“over policed”?

~~~
danielhlockard
I would argue that non-white neighborhoods are policed heavier, and as a
consequence they "catch more criminals" in those neighborhoods.

~~~
iguy
More policing may indeed catch more minor crimes that would otherwise go
unobserved.

But the morgue has a pretty close to 100% set of data on murder victims. It's
hard to argue that those are caused by catching more criminals. (And in fact,
murders in high-crime neighborhoods are _less_ likely to be solved. If
anything, murders are caused by this _failure_ to catch first-time murderers,
before their second go. Their victims are also, usually, residents of the same
bad neighborhoods.)

~~~
baddox
But how does the level of policing in an area affect murder rates? I don't
know the answer, but from statistics I've seen, it seems pretty clear that
police are not exactly great at solving murders.

~~~
iguy
Are you seriously claiming that the presence of police increases the murder
rate? Or are you actually asking to know by what mechanisms policing can
prevent murders?

Once you are talking about _solving_ a murder, clearly that one was not
prevented. It may draw detectives to the neighborhood looking for clues. It's
pretty hard to argue that the causality runs from these detectives to the
murder though.

~~~
baddox
> Are you seriously claiming that the presence of police increases the murder
> rate?

No, I'm not, and I didn't say anything remotely suggesting that.

~~~
iguy
Yea I couldn't figure it out. The context of the thread was which way the
causality goes from density of policing to level of crime. What were you
saying then?

------
Havoc
>to send officers to target chronic offenders, or identifying places where
crime may occur.

Those are two very different things in my mind.

Targeting individuals is very Minority Report and definitely not cool.

Focusing on problematic areas seems like good policing common sense though? A
bit like the local nightclub near me has a police car chilling in front of it
every Friday night because there are always drunks slugging it out.

~~~
QuotedForTruth
Are they actually focusing on problematic areas or just areas that they
previously focused on? Wherever the most police resources are spent, you will
have the most crime. That then justifies spending more resources there. The
algorithm may not be racist, but it is guaranteed to perpetuate our
objectively racist policing of the past.

~~~
sfj
> The algorithm may not be racist, but it is guaranteed to perpetuate our
> objectively racist policing of the past.

Depends on how the algorithm is formulated. If it's based on number of crimes
found, _by policeman_ , by hour, then this would eliminate that concern (vs
just number of crimes per hour).

------
WrongThinkerNo5
With what seems to be nothing but criticism of policing policies, I would love
to know what the ideal or even acceptable policing policies are, presuming
that any policing will be accepted.

The most simple minded can be critics, but what is the alternative? What
happens when the lawless mob and criminals want to break and enter your home
and take your things and burn down your life? It's easy enough when it's the
"others" stuff and homes and lives. But this is clearly a breakdown of
equality under the law … equal laws that are equally enforced with equal
penalties. Is that objectionable to anyone? I thought we are striving for
equality. You cant achieve equality when some get away with breaking the law
and others don't; and some get light sentences and others have even the clear
case against them dropped. That's not equality.

~~~
socalnate1
"What happens when the lawless mob and criminals want to break and enter your
home and take your things and burn down your life?"

Uhm what? Is this a common problem in your life?

If this question is asked seriously, here is a serious answer:

[https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-
from-...](https://theweek.com/articles/918143/what-america-learn-from-nordic-
police)

~~~
Baeocystin
Not the person you were replying to, but I can speak as someone who lived in a
country that was essentially lawless as a kid. When there isn't a unifying
civil authority, mobs do in fact take whatever they feel like if you have the
least bit of something worth taking. It leads to ubiquitous misery.

------
rickyplouis
Thought it would be relevant but a few years back California was also in the
news for building a gang database of children as young as one year old (for
which they've since acknowledged as a mistake).

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calgang-california-gang-
databas...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/calgang-california-gang-database-
slammed-listing-babies-privacy-concerns/)

The phrasing of "predictive policing" sounds fairly harmless, but in practice
it is a way of finding out which kids are going to be future criminals, thus
robbing them of their self-determination.

~~~
tehjoker
In practice, it's a method of entrenching racist practice. Certain groups are
profiled and criminalized, and therefore have criminal records so more police
are sent to predicted "hot zones" which results in a feedback loop.

What is never said is that crimes are socially determined. Which is more
harmful? Shoplifting by a poor person or wage theft by a business owner?
Clearly the latter as an actual person who can't afford it is harmed. Wage
theft is hugely more prevalent but is treated as a civil issue rather than a
crime. Poor people trying to get one over on the system that impoverishes them
lands them in jail while the people that own the society get away with doing
whatever they want.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I'm just not sure this makes the point you think it does. There are certainly
some who see crime as a morally neutral way to "get one over on the system
that impoverishes them", but most people find this to be an abhorrent
viewpoint and have no interest in accommodating it.

~~~
clawedjird
_I’m not who you responded to, FYI._

That said, crimes are simply whatever those in power deem them to be. Not only
does this imply an obvious disconnect between legality and morality, but for
groups not adequately represented by those in power, it can make living within
the law virtually impossible. Take the gay community, for example. It was only
in 2003 that the US Supreme Court struck down state laws banning sex between
same-sex partners. At the time, 14 states still had such laws on the books -
11 _still_ do today (even though they’re now unenforceable, they’ve resulted
in multiple arrests since the 2003 ruling).

A few decades earlier, gay sex was essentially illegal throughout the entire
US. Do you have any interest in accommodating the viewpoint that gay Americans
being gay Americans before the past 20-50 years (depending on the state they
resides in) were morally acceptable, despite habitually engaging in criminal
activity? Or would that be considered abhorrent?

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I certainly am skeptical of the idea of victimless crimes, for the reasons you
say. But theft isn't a victimless crime, even if you're stealing from a large
corporation and not a mom-and-pop store. I think it's hard to seriously engage
with the idea that theft might not be a bad thing.

------
zelly
Living in a country with an inefficient police department is not fun. Ask
anyone from you know who came from Cuba, Brazil, Honduras, Venezuela, or South
Africa.

Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department is not fun
either. See: China and Singapore.

There is a balance. Banning soulless social credit-tier stuff like this is a
good step in the right direction. Another problem with stuff like "predictive
policing" is that everyone knows a hypothetical 100% enforcement of the law
would put almost everybody in prison; there are too many laws on the books in
the USA. The first laws that come to mind are about the drug war. (Even cops
are drug (steroid) addicts, so they themselves would go to prison too under
100% enforcement.) I don't use drugs, not even alcohol, but if someone thinks
some white powder is going to make them happy or selling it would put food on
the table then they should not be brutalized by the state for it.

ML and mass surveillance is going to actually allow 100% enforcement of laws,
so it's time to have this discussion and redo the criminal code.

~~~
Jdam
> Living in a country with an extremely efficient police department is not fun
> either. See: China and Singapore.

I lived in Singapore it was one of the best times of my life. But you know
what? I never even saw the police there. I can't even tell you how their
uniform or cars look like. But also I didn't smoke pot or vandalised; I
respected the rules that that community set up.

------
lordnacho
One issue I haven't heard much about is what misconceptions people have about
AI/ML in general. This kind of thing only makes it worse.

There's a lot of ways an ML system can go wrong, and it won't be obvious to
everyone who uses it. Dataset badly sampled? Cop ain't gonna know that. In
fact, from his POV he's using fancy new equipment that the department has paid
some highly qualified consultants for.

What I worry about is we have actual data scientists like the guys at top unis
who teach and know how the sausage is made.

And then we have some consultant people who kinda know how to shove some data
into a model and get a result out. I'm not saying they're totally incompetent,
but their incentives are misaligned. They want the data to mean some things
that it can't mean, in terms of epistemology, or in terms of level of
confidence. You could very easily bake a false correlation <> causation into
this kind of thing, and use it to arrest whoever you like. This is especially
true if the guy you're selling it to also has wrong incentives.

And the guy at the bottom using this model ends up thinking that he has a
magic box that tells him who is gonna be a criminal in the future. When he
arrests someone, it's a very deep explanation why it isn't the way he thought,
something I could see the judge not getting.

That is not to say such a system is never going to work anywhere, but if
you're operating a predictive system you need to know a bunch of stuff about
it to do so responsibly.

------
jmpman
Does this mean that the cops can’t camp out in a bar’s parking lot at 2am,
watching drunks walk to their cars? Seems like they’re predicting that bar
parking lots routinely have drunk drivers at 2am....

If a resident gets a drunk driving ticket due to the above strategy, can their
conviction get dismissed because cops weren’t patrolling using a
Cryptographically secure random number generator?

Please let me know when a lawyer first uses that defense. Always looking for a
good laugh.

------
CivBase
> predictive policing relies on algorithms to interpret police records,
> analyzing arrest or parole data to send officers to target chronic
> offenders, or identifying places where crime may occur.

So... instead of using algorithms, how will the police decide where to patrol
heaviest? Putting a human in charge of that seems like a great way to
_increase_ racial bias. Or am I misunderstanding what "predictive policing"
is?

~~~
blueplanet200
I'm very curious what "banning" predictive policing even means here. In the
broadest sense, predictive policing is using data to inform where crime will
happen in the future.

Is this to say you can't use historical trends to allocate police in a city?
Should police be allocated only based on population size/density in a region?

Is using your knowledge of what neighborhoods tend to be "crime heavy"
predictive? Are they crime heavy because of increased policing (you found more
crime because you were looking) or because there really was more crime?

What is the line here?

------
rudolph9
I wish anonymous metadata and source code was open! This kind of software has
potential to positively impact society but not when it cannot be freely
audited and debated by the public empowered to vote for changes to it.

I suspect there is a storm brewing with proprietary government software.
Social services like child endangerment checkups, child placements, etc.
sentencing recommendations, as mentioned predictive policing,
watchdog/oversight departments , and so much more!

These tools can empower us or enslave us and a big step toward empowerment is
the open source community to push for open source and open data for software
augmented government functions!

~~~
agilebyte
If we had access to granular data like this, wouldn't it lead to further
gentrification and a further rift within a society?

~~~
rudolph9
How so? What is your though process on this?

~~~
agilebyte
Given a choice between two neighbourhoods, would I want to move to one that
has grow ops or a high rate of social services checkups? Some of that data is
already easily available and I know it is being used by real estate agents
already. The people that can avoid these neighbourhoods will, which leaves
only those that can't. Gentrification.

The neighbourhood I grew up in was heavily mixed (along social strata) which
prevented these problems from arising in the first place.

~~~
rudolph9
> The people that can avoid these neighbourhoods will, which leaves only those
> that can't.

You’re describing people who are stuck in impoverished (correct me if I’m
mistaken) where but gentrifications refer to the restoration and upgrading of
deteriorated urban property by middle-class or affluent people, often
resulting in displacement of lower-income people.

Gentrification has a lot to do with location in proximity to a city center,
transportation, waterfront, etc. Just because a neighborhood is safer doesn’t
necessarily mean wealthy people will move there, drive up property values
indirectly forcing out the poorer residents.

Look at Japan, the country has a universally low crime rate and poor areas are
still relatively cost effective for low income residents.
[https://www.quora.com/Which-part-of-Japan-is-viewed-as-
the-p...](https://www.quora.com/Which-part-of-Japan-is-viewed-as-the-poorest-
and-most-backward-by-other-Japanese?share=1)

I’m not saying this won’t accelerate gentrification of desirable areas
currently full of crime in-turn currently avoided wealthier people. But a cost
effective solution which results in a net decrease in crime (not a zero sum
game where a neighborhood gentrifies and the crime just shifts elsewhere),
would likely benefit mostly lower income individuals then most.

Obviously solution nothing is universal beneficial and there is the obvious
concern of humans progressing being enslave by black-box AI systems but it has
potential to be very beneficial if rolled out in a publicly auditable way.

------
linuxftw
The system is truly evil. There are so many non crimes that are enforced, then
in the process of enforcement, the police escalate situations. Drinking a cold
beer in public on a hot day? That's illegal. So, they're going to reach out
and grab your arm, you reflexively pull away. Okay, now you just assaulted a
police officer. That's your 3rd felony charge, life's over for you.

Using software to find easy targets like this, it's despicable.

------
blackrock
Honestly, for all the money that they spend on cops and these high tech
programs, there is a much simpler solution.

Give the poor people money!

Give them a safe place to live. Pay for their rent, or offset it with some
rental assistance. Give them jobs. Give their children education, so that they
can grow up to get better jobs. Give them medical care, so that they can stay
healthy. Give them access to healthy foods so that they can eat healthy.

Stop arresting people for stupid things. And dismantle the Prison Industrial
Governing System.

Have a heart already.

It’s really not a difficult problem to solve.

This is not a problem that requires advanced technology. It is a societal
problem, that requires all of society to solve it.

America needs to spread the wealth. America needs to be more inclusive. Not
exclusive!

------
manfredo
Back before computers were a thing in most people's homes, let alone pockets,
police would plot on a map the crime reports of the past year and assign more
patrols to areas with a high density of crime.

Is this practice now banned? Because this is predictive policing, albeit in a
crude form. Presumably it just means computerized predictive policing, but it
still seems odd that people see to think that analyzing past patterns of crime
to better allocate police is something novel.

------
ooobit2
This thread makes me wish I hadn't gone to grad school for an MSDA. I'd be a
lot less angry at the ineptitude on bold display in this thread.

------
jmspring
The funny thing about the origins of PredPol - a sitting councilman and a
liaison with SCPD were both part of the early team at PredPol and those
connections helped encourage Santa Cruz to adopt the technology.

SCPD, in general, is one of the more level headed and compassionate police
departments I've known members on and they've had a history of lack of city
support (it was better for a few years) over the last 3 decades.

~~~
chippy
is there anything a resident can do? is the city run by the democrat or
republican? is the pd or mayor a democrat? Is the police chief an electable
position? (im in the UK and have been there for a day or 2, it seems pretty
left wing)

how can a normal person living in the city use democracy to make real change?

------
mmsimanga
Is it the technology or how the technology is used that is the problem? I have
to add disclaimer that I am not in the US so not particularly well informed.
Like all technology there good and bad aspects to it. Use it to catch a child
kidnapper, the technology is great. Mistakenly identify the wrong person then
not so great.

~~~
throwawaygh
_> Is it the technology or how the technology is used that is the problem?_

Both, and they aren't perfectly separable.

 _> Use it to catch a child kidnapper, the technology is great. Mistakenly
identify the wrong person then not so great._

This "ends justify the means" calculus has not, historically, been the
disposition of the US justice system. We have many constitutionally enshrined
rights that indisputably make it more difficult to catch child kidnappers.

------
qwerty456127
Predictive policing is an idea gone totally wrong (predictably).

Data can tell us what, when and where to keep an eye at, it can help us
highlight roots of criminal activity (social inequality, bad schools,
unsustainable business practices, pollution[1,2,3], non-restorative penal
system, police corruption, etc). but it can never rightfully justify treating
any given person as a dangerous criminal or even a suspect.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21565624)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193609](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193609)

[3]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140942](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9140942)

------
matthewfelgate
These over-reactions are bloody stupid. All technology comes with issues. But
don't ban it, fix it.

------
squarefoot
Am I wrong or they have completely missed the point, or perhaps are just
making noise to pretend they're somehow assessing the problem? The point
shouldn't be sending more cops here and less cops there but stripping racist
fascist drugged psychopaths of their uniform, their badge, their weapons and
their immunity - all of them and for good - then leave real cops who deserve
them do their job. All it takes is _one_ criminal cop to kill an innocent, so
playing with numbers won't achieve nothing. As of today, the Police has no
quality control, or its parameters are messed up to a point most of them
became worse than the criminals they should fight against.

------
sneak
> _His administration will work with the police to “help eliminate racism in
> policing”, the seaside city’s first male African-American mayor said on his
> Facebook page, following a vote on Tuesday evening._

Inconvenient fact:

The only way to eliminate racism in policing is to eliminate human beings
doing the policing.

All humans have inherent bias. Racism, sexism, classism, and a whole host of
other -isms will always be present in policing conducted by humans. Any
solution that does not inherently account for this, expect this, and have well
defined and widely known processes for detecting and remediating this is a
non-solution.

Every human being has racial biases.

~~~
IndySun
I wish we could eliminate worthless comments. Of course, technically it is
true. But billions of decent human don't go around acting on that bias.
However, violently biased men and women in uniform with guns and alloted power
need to be removed, arrested in uniform, and charged, jailed, for disgracing
the profession.

~~~
sneak
I think rather than saying “well, MOST people aren’t that racist”, we would do
well to recognize that bias exists in everyone and simply build systems to
detect when it affects job performance, proactively, rather than retroactively
reacting to reporter/demonstrated bad behavior.

Police in the US have failed to hold themselves to a higher standard,
therefore a better system that understands that police officers are humans
like anyone else (and likely to fail to be unbiased like anyone else) would be
a welcome replacement.

It’s absolutely going to happen, everything from microaggressions and
profiling, all the way up to lynching (all of which we’ve seen in HD video
many times in the last quarter). The current “just get rid of the bad ones”
approach is plainly insufficient.

------
anonytrary
This should be obvious to people, I hope. The fact that you might break a law
is _obviously_ not evidence that you broke the law. This is common sense.
Predictive policing is a joke concept.

------
WhompingWindows
Devil's Advocate: Assuming predictive policing actually worked...How much
racism (or classism) is tolerable versus how much of a cut in crime?

Extreme case: Would we accept 1 racist interaction for 1000 cases where
predictive policing solved the case?

Realistic case: Would we accept 1 racist interaction for 10 cases where
predictive policing solved the case?

My point: We know about implicit and institutional racism being VERY hard to
erase...can we live with a small amount of it in return for a much more
effective police force?

------
say_it_as_it_is
Big cities used to be really dangerous but crime was put under control by
methods that are now under attack. Data-driven predictions of where crime will
happen allows police to dedicate resources to locations where they will be
most effective at preventing crime. Data-driven decision making is what drives
every sector in society. It belongs in policing. This ban is a mistake.
Unfortunately, the consequences of the ban won't be experienced until those
who voted the rule into effect are long gone from office.

------
phkahler
One way to preventing such positive feedback (more policing means more crime)
may be to use only reported crime or calls to the police when allocating
resources to an area.

~~~
seaish
This is not the answer. People are just as likely to be biased as police, and
when this system is known, it can be used by malevolent citizens to influence
where police go, not just in racial ways either.

------
baby
I’ve thought about something. I’m pretty sure that being single can really do
some damages to you, or having a poor family more easily leads to you becoming
a criminal. I’ve once heard someone saying that if everybody could get hooked
then there would be no terrorism. Does it mean we should invest in
surveillance and monitoring of people who are poor and single? Or should we
instead fund aids, universal healthcare, free education or even UBI.

------
kriro
I think there's a big difference in using it to predict who will commit a
crime (a big nono imo) vs. where a crime will be committed. For example
allocating patrols by likelyhood of breakins seems acceptable to me and might
even free up resources for more important tasks. Same for mundane stuff like
more patrol cars/checks for areas with more potential speeding violations/car
accidents due to reckless driving etc.

------
m0zg
This is a really bad knee-jerk in the long term. These systems should be
improved, and relied upon less, rather than banned. You want to identify the
"at risk" individuals and focus on them not getting into trouble,
preemptively? Predictive policing could help you with that. Arguably, this
should be its main purpose in the first place.

------
2ion
This is big mistake, because being able to reason about past facts and making
assumptions about the feature is a skill that sets man apart from the rest of
nature. If you fall into a purely reactive mode you won't likely create great
things and stability, because firemen are always too busy.

------
dqpb
Isn't predictive policing actually two different things combined into one? 1.
Predict crime 2. Police. I could imagine a near infinite permutation of
actions one could take at step 2 that don't boil down to "policing".

------
billyo
There are definitely techniques that could be used to modify this. over
sampling of cases when dealing with unbalanced class problems is one
technique. No reason to throw out the baby with the bath water

------
m3kw9
Predictive has always been used. You can predict a lot of things based on data
even on your own. A certain neighborhood downtown could have more criminals.
Just tip if the iceberg here

------
TimesOldRoman
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
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

------
srathi
Funny, I just rewatched Minority Report last night! I had no idea that
precrime was an actual thing.

------
randyrand
Does that mean they can no longer arrive at protests before a crime has
happened?

------
outlace
Does predictive policing demonstrably reduce crime?

------
wintorez
So we were low-key moving toward minority report?

------
coronadisaster
How are we going to prevent terrorists? /s

------
fpgaminer
I think many commenters here fail to understand the real world consequences
these racist algorithms have had. Go watch the ethics section of Lesson 6 in
the Fast AI course
([https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=6);](https://course.fast.ai/videos/?lesson=6\);)
it covers many ethical topics, predictive policing being one of them. It's
amazing that ethics aren't mandatory in computer science education. Should
have learned our lesson 80 years ago when IBM happily computerized mass
genocide.

------
JDulin
> "low-income, ethnic minority neighbourhoods have historically been over-
> policed so the data shows them as crime hotspots, leading to the deployment
> of more police to those areas."

This is wrong. They've been under-policed. And the unwillingness to not lie
about that, let alone understand why that is, is why "predictive policing" is
disliked. It's also why the rhetorical trick of "systemic racism" is necessary
to elide the fact that racism is rare today and justify why politicians are
attacking & dismantling functioning institutions rather than fix the
underlying issue.

Does anyone seriously claim that suburbs like Beachwood, OH and Palo Alto, CA
and Everett, WA would discover a bunch of undetected rapes, gun violence,
robberies, and murders if they were "over-policed" like low-income black
neighborhoods? No, they don't. Because that would be too silly of a claim to
make directly to anyone who has lived in such a place.

There's a humane chain of logic we must follow here. Do we think slavery, red-
lining, drugs & drug-enforcement, and the collapse of rising working class
wages have hurt African-American well-being? Yes. Does poverty correlate with
crime? Yes. Does poverty correlate with African-American neighborhoods? Yes.
Ok, so we can admit that African Americans account for a hugely
disproportionate amount of violent crime in the United States without
disrespecting how black communities got to this point or worrying that this
simple, obvious conclusion is driven by racism.

This is trivially produced from _well-done_ statistical research. If you
control for either poverty rates or crime rates, you recover the same rate of
police use of lethal force for both whites and blacks.

"Oh, well, the data sets from the past may be biased with racism"

13% of the population accounts for between 40-50% of the homicides, year over
year. Alright - How large do you think purely unfounded biases account for
that? Half? Even then, you have both 1) A LE agencies either falsifying or
mishandling data on a _massive_ scale, a monumental scandal in itself and 2)a
population accounting for 2x rather than 3-4x their expected homicide rate.
Not a huge improvement. I don't feel like the claims of "warped data" deserve
this much respect because the people who make them never give the same thought
to the much more obvious conclusion - The data is true, but I do.

ML is disliked here because it doesn't lie. Politicians cannot torture or
cajole logistic regression to lie because it doesn't have a career, it doesn't
need a promotion, it just graphs the truth. But more than this, they dislike
it because it indicts them for not doing more, and more meaningful and honest
things, to actually improve the lot of African-Americans in this country. The
first step to doing that is being honest.

------
throwawaysea
This seems like a knee jerk reaction to the current political climate.
"Predictive policing" has a scary sounding name but it is really just
"efficient resource allocation". If there is a crime hotspot, shouldn't there
be more police on hand to enforce the law there? Why have them idly patrol
other areas? If someone has a history of crime and is being released,
shouldn't they be monitored to ensure the public's safety, especially if there
is a risk of recidivism?

The line of thinking I find dangerous in the article is that differences in
_outcomes_ are seen as racist. That doesn't make sense to me. If more people
of race X commit crimes, and more members of that race are therefore subjected
to legal consequences, then that is not necessarily a racist situation. If
race isn't an input factor into these algorithms, the algorithms are not
racist.

