
Dubai Police now using Crime Prediction software - futureguy
http://newatlas.com/dubai-police-crime-prediction-software/47092/
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hohenheim
And they also do shit like this: [http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-
arrested-for-giving-...](http://gulfnews.com/news/uae/crime/maid-arrested-for-
giving-birth-to-illegitimate-baby-1.1947750)

~~~
spraak
How sad for the baby and mother :( and anyone there who is affected by laws
like this. What happens if a woman is raped and becomes pregnant?

~~~
angry_octet
By 'rape' do you mean she had sex outside a legitimate marriage? If so, she is
guilty of prostitution or adultery or illicit sex. There is of course no such
thing as marital rape. For rape to be proven there must be multiple adult male
witnesses who will testify. The penalty for 'lying' about being raped is a
year in jail. And the penalty for abortion is death.

~~~
dang
It's clear from your other comments that this is simply describing something
you find appalling, as do we all.

As the number of readers gets large, though, the long tail of interpretation
guarantees that a few will, for whatever random reason, miss the subtext. The
cost of such misreadings (pointless off-topic indignation) is high. So when
commenting on appalling or other divisive things, please be explicit rather
than implicit.

This is one case of the general phenomenon—noticeable on HN—that effective
communication to large, weakly cohesive groups works differently than to
small, close ones. The available range is narrower if one wants not to put the
needle in the red. That's a pity, because it gives less latitude for
expressing yourself, but putting the needle in the red is much worse.

~~~
angry_octet
Ack.

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prawn
I've wondered before if something like this could be used in a positive way to
deter crime rather than harass targets. e.g., if the data suggested youths in
a certain area and time were prone to acting up, it could propose some sort of
distraction instead - street ball tournament, TV station truck doing an
impromptu giveaway, police outreach, etc.

~~~
PavlovsCat
It would absolutely possible to train neural nets to use speeches and
interviews of politicians and powerful people to suggest likely canditates for
sociopathy and other fun things. The trouble is that those people would not
submit to actual clinical diagnosis, and even if they did, nothing useful
would come of it. Failing to even _think_ in such directions, and instead
pondering how to treat small fish even more like lab rats, that can't be the
way.

~~~
peteretep

        > to suggest likely canditates
        > for sociopathy
    

But what use would that information be? I don't care one iota if my president
is a sociopath as long as he or she implements the agenda I want them to.

~~~
PavlovsCat
And since you have zilch recourse if they don't, making predictions based on
their past behaviour and personality is your only bet. Also, marketing budgets
in the millions of all sorts of people and corporations engineered to make
them seem less banshee-like speak another language -- you may not care, but
most people still have the hair on the back of their back stand up when faced
with the alien, barren inner landscape of a sociopath. Faking it is, uhm, kind
of important to everything they do and are. Without it, they have a meltdown,
at best only destroying themselves. If we're talking about the real deal and
not just someone who is sometimes a bit of a jerk, that is.

If people mind stuff like baby killers, Stalin and other things, they do mind
sociopaths, whether they know what the word implies or not.

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automatwon
The first thing I thought of when I saw the title was "Lamborghini". Indeed,
the article would have that picture to start with. It's funny that this was my
first thought, but it says a lot about perception of Dubai, in general. I
can't put a word on it, but the fact that they have Lamborghini police cars
makes me say "Pfft. Of course the police would have crime prediction software.
Duh." The word is at the intersection somewhere in the Platonic clouds of tech
billionaire, startup, ridiculous, no-brainer / obvious, Vertu, excessive,
prudent, utility, vanity. I guess 'Dubai' is a sufficient stand-in word.

~~~
chinathrow
To be fair, they're not the only Police force doing the Lambo stunt ;)

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-
police...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/30/italian-police-
lamborghini)

~~~
karmacoda
Ah, but the two Italian Lamborghinis were donated. Otherwise I would've been
very unimpressed.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
Even if they weren't, the cars _are made in Italy_. I'd consider it reasonable
for the police there to purchase the cars.

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fixxer
Great... Maybe now they can use their precognition software to find more
adulterous women (rape victims) or hostile employees (slaves from South Asia).

~~~
wildchild
Sure they will search for runaway slaves.

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omegaworks
Organizing for labor rights looks an awful lot like crime to the capitalist.
Especially the capitalist holding their employees' passports hostage while
they perform a modern form of indentured slavery. [0] Please don't contribute
to software that promotes and sustains this practice, resist in any way you
can.

0\. [https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-
dubai](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-slaves-of-dubai)

~~~
KON_Air
Dubai is light years away from understanding, let alone practising,
capitalism. And no, unless you are talking about contemporary Comedy
Imperialism with Crony Capitalism sauce on top of it, one of Capitalisms core
principles is respecting all sorts of capital beyond monetary ones.

Ya'know I'm just saying, things like abolishing slavery and competing for and
trying to create quality workforce... stuff nobody cares about when it comes
to capitalism for last few decades, which were supposed to lead into socialism
if it functioned well.

~~~
omegaworks
I probably went too far in commingling the power of the state and the primary
benefactors of its economic system. Some citizens then use this state-force to
avoid providing foreign workers with even the most basic rights. This
commingling of state power and economic power just reminded me of the early
days of labor struggle in America. [0]

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike)

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onion2k
So if you're devising some sort of GTA-style heist, make sure you include a
strong source of randomness in your plans.

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BickNowstrom
This is just automating capacity planning. Now done by hand, but better done
with computers.

As to the degree this is "encoding racial bias", I feel this is passing the
buck to the computer. The computer is merely calculating a probability
distribution on historical data the best it possibly can (and likely, more
accurate, effective, and with more objectivity than humans ever can).
Impartiality or partiality does not start or end with a computer program, it
starts with human policies.

One does not solve police racism by creating a model that adheres to your view
of an ideal world. This argumentation is naive. It does not change anything,
but perhaps makes you feel good. You either solve it at its core, or you don't
solve it at all.

One should also distinguish between heavy-crime areas and police bias. Some
areas, where a certain race may be overrepresented, are just more prone to
street crimes. This is not bias, but fact. Don't cripple your model, just
because you don't agree with the facts.

As for white collar crime vs. street crime; automated systems to detect fraud,
insider trading, scams, and theft, are also in place. These just don't benefit
from capacity planning / more police presence on the streets.

The Minority Report angle is journalistic nonsense / click-bait, akin to
invoking Terminator when talking about Google's AI efforts. This is about
areas of crime, not pre-crime for individuals.

These systems can adapt. If an area sees a drop in crime rate, then that area
requires less police presence. It is not just trained on a single snapshot.

Finally, such Crime Prediction software can be used by human police officers
to make better decisions. It is far off from self-driving police cars without
any human input.

Note, I am not saying algorithmic bias does not exist, or that this is not an
important issue to solve, as we start automating more processes in society.
But then, let's discuss it on fair and equal ground, and leave human bias
against "human-biased" systems out. We can talk about this mathematically now,
or at least, in a non-emotional rational manner.

Aside: Other comments here are very America-centric, and detract from the
topic at hand. It's like posting news articles on manual SWAT-raids gone wrong
in NY, when discussing predictive policing software in California.

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faragon
I was tempted to work for a company of Dubai in 2005, and discarded it because
of the legal stuff involved. Scary.

~~~
angry_octet
Wise decision. Don't even visit the gulf states if you've ever worked for
someone there and something went wrong, even if you weren't at fault and the
work was done elsewhere. You have no rights in their system.

------
eb0la
I guess they are not the first.

There is a company from Israel that deployed _10 years ago_ algoritms to score
if people was lying, or angry when people called the police.

And it makes sense.

Anything that helps you triage when you have limited resources it's a good
idea.

And any tool that suggest _deterrent_ actions to keep your resources is also a
good idea (ie police near a metro station next to a stadium _hours_ before a
sports event so pickpocketers don't come nearby).

For me the weakest point is not the technical part (mechanisms), is how you
use them (policies).

I mean, you need some policy to trigger reactions to signals. And since
policies are made by human people, that has more bias than any algorithm you
can ever produce, plus and policy changes will surely affect how the "system"
works and how it needs retraining.

So, unless this is used for very simple stuff with simple policies it won't
work.

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ada1981
I'd imagine that this simply displaces the crime to other areas. It could see
short-term impact but I'm less clear on the long term reduction in crime vs.
simply shifting it in a game of wack-a-mole -- I'd be curious on research.

However, this sort of information would be useful if you could figure out
where support structures could be put in place vs simply deploying police...
ie, planting community gardens, providing housing to the homeless, providing
fresh food and child care, teaching parenting skills, etc.

Of course, you don't really need software to tell you that providing for
people's basic needs drastically reduces crime.

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delegate
> The idea isn't just to go there and arrest suspicious-looking people, but to
> use a larger police presence in an area to deter crime from happening in the
> first place.

But then if the crime does not happen, what is this software predicting ?

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kylehotchkiss
This seems like a net win to me.

We imagine this with USA police and see where things could go wrong, but our
police and Dubai's police have unique sets of problems to deal with.

Dubai has a very very high incentive to keep their crime rates as low as
possible, and being a much more young growing nation with the capital to do
so, this certainly keeps their appeal as a place to do business and vacation
viable despite the region they're in.

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anocendi
What is your hue?

Psycho-pass and Minority Report becoming reality?

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deepnotderp
Excellent! Now they can overfit their models to certain facial structures and
claim they're doing "cutting edge security".

The "blah blah" MACHINE LEARNING strikes again....

