
Sci-fi policing: L.A. police predicting crime before it occurs - iProject
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Sci-fi-policing-predicting-crime-before-it-occurs-3677100.php
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zacharypinter
There's a lot of upcoming uses of technology and law enforcement that concern
me (crowd control, non-lethal weapons, drones, cctv, etc). However, on first
glance, this one seems great.

I could see an algorithm come up with a lot of interesting correlations that
make sense in hindsight but might not have been thought of ahead of time. For
example, maybe a particular stretch of bars the weekend after payday are more
likely to have confrontations just after closing time. Or maybe certain
neighborhoods are more vulnerable to robberies during a specific holiday. Or
maybe specific set of sports teams pitted against each other leads to conflict
outside the game.

Using police to passively deter crime rather than punish it seems like a win-
win.

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rmc
Police have been doing that for as long as there's been police. They are more
likely to have police outside a bar at midnight on a Friday night than 2pm on
a Tuesday. They are just doing it better now.

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noahc
I'm not sure I'm willing to make this argument yet, but I think there is at
least something to stand on to say, "Yeah, but they can be too efficient."

Perhaps, not in the case of this example. But think about GPS tracking. Before
if you wanted to follow someone around you usually had to dedicate at least 4
people 24/7 to watching them. Now, just use GPS and your good to go.

It's not so much about watching the good guys, but in my view it's about not
having to make the choice to allocate resources. Is this person really worth
taking 8 guys (4 per 12 hour shift) off of another case/patrol, etc to watch
one person. That probably prevented a lot of abuse. Now, you slap a tracker on
their car and come back in two weeks and pick it up and all the data is there.

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Retric
I think it might be reasonable argument.

Suppose you have an upper class neighborhood that tends to collect a lot of
noise complaints on the weekend. In theory sending a cop there might make an
algorithm that's trying to minimize response times happy, but the reason cops
tend to be stationed else-ware is to better respond to serious crimes because
the station is 2 minutes away in case of a serious issues so there are better
places to send cops to cover a full county. Sort of how a lot of algorithms
made bad risk assessments because they had a poor understanding of what
happens during a significant downturn in the housing market.

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delinka
I'm sure this headline invokes "Minority Report" in more brains than just
mine, but this isn't pinpointing individuals. It's just Really Good
statistical modeling. Sounds impressive and a great way to put tax dollars to
work.

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mc32
Definitely. It would seem they are trying to make it sound like MR in order to
put people off of it. But really, it's just really good statistical (or data)
modelling.

As they said, there probably will be questions about profiling people and
neighborhoods, but if the desired result is to reduce crime and it does reduce
crime, does that not in fact subvert the notion of the stereotype? That's to
say, if people think this might stereotype a neighborhood as one with more
than normal criminal activity and this is implemented and this brings down
crime, then in time, this neighborhood would be better than normal, in crimes
statistically speaking and would rehabilitate the neighborhood, rather than
vilify it.

Besides, in reality, it doesn't matter what the police or the mayor's office
say, it matters what people on the street say. People on the street are
unconcerned with being PC. They will tell you if a neighborhood is good or
bad. One of the most honest assessment I have gotten is from RE agents. They
don't offer any filters --they just tell you how it is, from my experience.

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sp332
The main question is whether people in those neighborhoods will be treated
differently. Written off as second-class citizens, denied rights like privacy
rights or protections against stupid warrants, or unwarranted force becoming
the default choice.

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mc32
Let's consider two options:

Don't deploy this and let crime continue to be fought traditionally --this
results in more neighborhood crime victims and continued view of this
neighborhood as crime ridden.

Deploy this technique with a long term result of decrease in crime such that
it's less than that of places which did not implement this prevention
technique. Once that is achieved, there would be no inclination to treat
people in those places differently.

So, given those scenarios, would a neighborhood accept different treatment
knowing that long term crime would decrease and thus obviate the need to be
treated differently, or would they prefer to continue the status quo knowing
this would allow crime to continue as it had but getting to keep their current
level of civil liberties?

I know those not the only options, but given those two, I wonder what a group
might choose?

Also, we do not know how this technique would affect people's civil liberties.
We only guess that it would.

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delinka
Allowing different treatment of individuals for any reason beyond actual
reasonable doubt is a dangerously slippery slope. Simply putting law
enforcement in an area that has higher crime statistics in an effort to
prevent crime is a good idea. Allowing those same officers to harass people in
the area that haven't committed a crime is unacceptable.

My only concern is this: if the long term effects of this project will indeed
reduce crime, do we have a society that's evolved to be less criminal or so we
simply lack the data (because we've actively changed it) to continue to be
effective at preventing crime?

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mc32
You're probably right about the slippery slope argument. There is a risk.
Still, NYC (and maybe soon SF) has implemented stop and frisk, without a
slippery slope, (afaik) and data seem to point to a reduction in crime.

Some people have found stop-and-frisk unacceptable, yet others find it
acceptable.

I don't think measuring decrease in crime is that difficult. One can find out
statistically or by way of anthropological study at the other end of the
spectrum. One of the easiest ways is probably to ask the residents. do they
feel that crime has risen or fallen? Ask Real Estate agents --they have a good
pulse on a neighborhood.

Now, something unrelated and this is just a hunch, but I guess that
neighborhoods with high home ownership would have better reception for this
than neighborhoods with low ownership --not because the population prefer
crime, but because a reduction in crime would have the side effect of having a
positive (higher) impact on rents and that's a negative for most renters.

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chrsstrm
I live in LA, and I can tell you it is huge. Huge in terms of area and huge in
terms of population density. Follow any of the police scanner-reporting or
neighborhood Twitter news feeds and you can count the crimes as they happen on
a minute by minute basis. It's not hard to find crime in LA, and even after
being exposed to these feeds I can tell you where to find something going
down. But the most puzzling piece of this is how do you measure a reduction in
crime? A criminal act that didn't happen isn't a crime and can't be counted as
a "missed opportunity." They mention in the article that they have witnessed
"double-digit drops in burglaries and other property crimes." Nine burglaries
this month compared to ten last month is a double-digit drop, so can you
really attribute one "missed" crime as a success? Or how about a reduction of
2 out of 20? (This is a valid example as property crimes in various police
districts here rarely go into triple digits monthly, or even on a six-month
basis, look for yourself [1]). Why would you assume that 1. the number of
criminal acts is near-constant and 2. that your system was the actual reason
for a decline? To me this feels like trying to predict roulette wins by
looking at the historical numbers - it's pointless. If you can't measure your
success with solid numbers, then it sounds like the only thing this system
does is compile and report crime info faster than previous systems. And then
someone got the bright idea to send officers to "hot zones" where they have
been told crime will happen. Something happens - they were looking extra hard
for crime and they found it - win, or nothing happened and they called it a
"prevention" - win.

[1] <http://projects.latimes.com/mapping-la/crime/>

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stretchwithme
A great idea. And the shape of things to come.

Imagine people people being able to report, not actual crime, but what could
be suspicious behavior, to the police. Such "information" could be used to
move resources to an area. You certainly can't harass someone based on such
suspicions, but certainly can be more ready to respond if a crime does occur.

And property owners might like to know this sort of information. If someone is
hanging around your parked car for example. Imagine being able to reply with
"Oh, that's my teenager waiting for me to come back." or "That's my psycho-ex
stalker girlfriend! And she has a crowbar!"

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THE_PUN_STOPS
This makes me really excited. Recently I've gotten the distinct feeling that
the time period we're living in now will be known in the future as "The Age of
the Algorithm." As production and storage of information continues to explode
in the next decades, algorithms will match pace, getting more and more
sophisticated to deal with the vast array of inputs, and the outputs will be
used to enhance society as in this article.

And then we'll accidentally create artificial intelligence! (I hope)

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anothermachine
Interesting notion....

<https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Age+of+the+Algorithm>

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sxcurry
Let me add a slightly more negative take. If you follow police technology, no
matter what's implemented, crime magically goes down! Although I can see a
system like this being a high-level tool for allocating resources, the notion
that it can "predict" crime is likely overblown. Where's the deep analysis to
show causation, not just correlation?

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mc32
I think the FBI figures are one that are pretty reliable and do not subjugate
themselves to an individual department's claims.

I think the Minority Report allusion is purposeful in order to make it sound
more sci-fi-ish and thus thus more questionable.

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Anechoic
_I think the FBI figures are one that are pretty reliable and do not subjugate
themselves to an individual department's claims._

If you're talking about UCR that's not completely true. The FBI does have
reporting guidelines, but individual departments have been known to
"interpret" those guidelines differently for political and funding purposes.
That is one of the reasons why the FBI discourages "ranking" of metropolitan
areas for crime based on UCR stats.

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gouranga
I predict that the criminals will develop similar statistical models to work
out where they will not likely be caught.

Most of the data they use is probably available to the public already under
various open data schemes, so it's only a case of wiring it up.

It'll turn into a game of cat and mouse like SEO is for example.

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SoftwareMaven
That may be true for organized crime and for borderline white-collar
criminals, but I doubt it will be true for your average "smash and grab"
robbery.

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rbanffy
You could offer it as an easy to use app. The would-be criminal sees an
opportunity, pops out the cellphone and gets an accurate estimate of how
likely it is that a cop will be around for the next couple minutes. Premium
subscribers will also get advice on which possible crimes would be more
profitable and likely to suceed with present police force deployment
anneighborhood demographics.

The sad part: someone will eventually do it.

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anothermachine
It turns out that abetting criminal activity is a crime. The app would have to
be much more circumspect to get any farther than speed trap apps.

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rbanffy
Any real-time neighborhood safety app that relies on the same data the police
uses (or a similarly complete dataset) intended for mapping areas suitable
for, say, nightly outdoors activities, can be used for avoiding police.

The second part, I agree, is completely criminal. I doubt it will become
available on any mainstream app store.

Except as part of a sting operation.

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bithead
_"If you are victimized today the risk that you'll be a victim again goes way
up,"_

Speaking from personal experience there is validity in that assertion.
However, I'm question any algorithm that claims to predict human behavior,
particularly when it involves the police.

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AustinGibbons
I met some of the founders, the company is called PredPol

<http://www.predpol.com/>

They were pretty awesome and there is a huge amount of space for them to grow.

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spl
"Crime mapping has long been a tool used to determine where the bad guys
lurk."

I'm assuming they mean where poor people live.

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5partan
Here you can see the software in Action: <http://goo.gl/maps/dYRG>

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maeon3
They don't say what methods they are employing to do this. I think I have a
good idea.

A two layer neural network with input (features) as the profile of a crime in
a certain city and all of the related circumstances reduced to numeric
columns. That should be able to produce reliable predictions on where/when
crimes happen.

Andrew Ng talks about how to build this two layer neural network here:
<http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs221/>

Glue it together, feed it the data, refine the inputs, test the outputs and
revise the inputs/features, and there you go.

And yes for the liberals, this is going to profile people on all of the
politically incorrect data points, race, color, sex, orientation, drug use,
etc.

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stretchwithme
orientation is a data point for criminal profiling? that's a new one.

How's that going to be detected?

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maeon3
You are right, criminals are not profiled for gay/straight/bi/neither
orientation, but if they could, a neural network would find a correlation
between that column and the location of their next crime.

Thas one column would not be enough to decide with any certainty at all,
however, if you pass in age, sex, weight, orientation, race, skin color,
religious affiliation, address, marital status, prior convictions, languages
spoken, income, has-vehicle, make/model of car, profession, where they work,
smokes, drinks, and hundreds of other spot data points about them, a two layer
neural network would be able to pull it all in, and use historical data to
train against later data, and use recent data to predict where the crimes are
going to occur, and it will be eerily right, gathering information gain from
what seems out of thin air.

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stretchwithme
I think its more likely that crime will be predicted by looking at actual
behavior. Someone unidentified that is acting suspiciously in a place where no
visitors are expected. That sort of detection is going to get automated and
will become ubiquitous.

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adventureful
I'm going to make a prediction that this will get massive hype and pomp
surrounding it, and three or four (or whatever) years from now when the first
big result sets roll in, it'll be discovered that it turns out it's not much
more (perhaps not at all more), effective than random patrols in bad areas.

Why? Because we live in a dynamic, non-fate based world. Crime is a choice,
and cannot actually be predicted (because destiny is not set). I can walk up
to the door of a convenience store with a gun, stop, think, and turn back.
Thus random patrols in known bad neighborhoods is guaranteed over a large
dataset to be as effective as 'predictive' crime technology.

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heroic
actually, you can not predict crimes of passion, but planned crimes, well, you
definitely can, cant you?

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anothermachine
Why can't you predict crimes of passion? People with poor impulse control are
easy to predict: they react violently or opportunistically to common
situations.

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ktizo
I predict a riot.

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heroic
this reminds me of person of interest

