
White Collar Crime Risk Zones - panarky
https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/
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CommieBobDole
I think this is mostly satire - it's based (sort of) on real data but it's
satirizing the idea of predicting crime with algorithms. From the attached
white paper:

"We therefore plan to augment our model with facial analysis and psychometrics
to identify potential financial crime at the individual level. As a proof of
concept, we have downloaded the pictures of 7000 corporate executives whose
LinkedIn profiles suggest they work for financial organizations, and then
averaged their faces to produce generalized white collar criminal subjects
unique to each high risk zone. Future efforts will allow us to predict white
collar criminality through real-time facial analysis."

[https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf](https://whitecollar.thenewinquiry.com/static/whitepaper.pdf)

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r00fus
I particularly enjoyed " Fig. 4: Example of features in a landscape that
create unique behavior settings for white collar criminal activity." with a
fisheye picture of skyscrapers.

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hectorr
I thought Matt Levine's daily had a good take:

"The deep message is that if you define criminality based on your negative
perception of some disliked group, then your criminals are going to look like
that group. If you assume that rural white people with guns are hunters and
urban minorities with guns are gang members, then your predictive policing
efforts will look for guns in cities rather than forests. If you assume that
Wall Street is an industry whose business model is fraud, then your predictive
policing efforts will look for fraud in midtown Manhattan. In both cases, it
is at least plausible that the group perception leads to the definition of
criminality, rather than the reverse. What makes you a criminal is not doing a
certain objectively defined sort of act; it's being a certain sort of person."

[https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-26/bank-
meet...](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-26/bank-meetings-and-
white-collar-crime)

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owenversteeg
Hmm. The JPMorgan Chase building is surrounded by red squares, but for some
reason the map indicates zero white collar crime there. I looked at a little
town I used to live in and the whole town had one single bright red square,
with the rest blank - the one red square was the location of a breakfast
restaurant and some gift shops (nobody lived there.)

If there's any useful information to be gained from this map, I'm not finding
it.

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saaaam
Hi. I'm one of the project creators. Happy to answer any questions.

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mjfl
What specifically are you trying to say/show with this satire?

I mean I get the point but I think you are underestimating the usefulness of
models for predicting white collar crime and crime in general by giving a
really bad model for doing so. In terms of data analysis, the geotag stuff has
decent specificity in terms of narrowing down your universe (from entire US to
city blocks), but the face stuff probably doesn't have very good specificity
(probably lots of false positives there). A good "data science" person would
probably try to find factors with higher specificity. But most of the stuff in
this model is already known via common sense _and acted upon_. The SEC knows
to look for white collar crime in Manhattan and not Lebanon NH without such a
model.

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dragonwriter
Even the white paper doesn't clearly identify the source data on financial
crimes, and it's hard not to suspect that the locations used for the crimes
are just the locations at which people charged with financial crimes of the
type included in the not-well-identified FINRA data set used _worked_.

And it's useless anyway; a violent crime heatmap is useful for deploying
police or avoiding violent crime. A financial crime heatmap is not, because
police patrolling the neighborhood doesn't deter or detect financial crimes,
and avoiding the locations where such crimes are "located" doesn't actually
protect you from the crimes.

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panarky
> And it's useless anyway; a violent crime heatmap is useful for deploying
> police or avoiding violent crime ...

I'm guessing your reaction is kinda the point of the project. Horrific crimes
are routinely committed that injure millions of people, with no punishment.

We know where these crimes are happening, and what kind of people are
committing them, yet there is very little action.

If it's OK to profile people by their appearance for drug and street crime,
why not do the same for financial swindlers, cheats and fraudsters?

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neutronicus
[https://xkcd.com/1138/](https://xkcd.com/1138/)

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mason55
I don't think that really applies here. For example in NYC you have almost no
white collar crime in Brooklyn, Queens or the Bronx but you do have hotspots
up in Stamford and Greenwich where there are many fewer people.

If you zoom all the way out, sure, it's just a population heat map, but this
is intended to be (a satire of) a neighborhood-level map.

~~~
pulisse
Impressively, it's even picking up some block-level data. Notice the hotspot
near Court Square in Long Island City: that's a Citibank tower.

