Police embracing tech that predicts crimes

Police embracing tech that predicts crimes

www.cnn.com

A map of a city is marked up with small red squares, each indicating a 500-by-500-foot zone where crimes are likely to take place next. A heat-map mode shows even more precisely where cars may be stolen, houses robbed, people mugged.
The program is called PredPol, and it calculates its forecasts based on times and locations of previous crimes, combined with sociological information about criminal behavior and patterns. The technology has been beta tested in the Santa Cruz, California police department for the past year, and in an L.A. police precinct for the past six months, with promising re

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What movie was this from again??? Talk about art imitating life! Or would that be the other way around?

All I know is Holy Freak Batman!

Officer: You are being arrested for a crime you may commit

Person: WTF?

Officer: Sorry Sir/Madam, we believe you will do this according to our program, please board the crazy train.

www.cnn.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

reply to post by Jerisa


Minority Report, I believe.

Uh.. I think you are missing the actual point. They arent showing up and arresting people cause a computer program said a crime would take place. But the officer could get to the location and perhaps witness, or be in position to respond once a crime does occur.

reply to post by Myendica


Not missing the point, just musing where this could lead to...

reply to post by Jerisa


Sounds like a solid program based on historical data and statistics. I've got something similar for the lottery, but it doesn't seem to work very good.

I don't see anything wrong with this, they are just trying to put their cops in the places most likely to need cops. That is exactly what they are supposed to do. It isn't like their interviewing kids and arresting people before they do anything wrong.

I suspect that this program will be quickly dropped after it starts predicting the staggering numbers crimes commited by law enforcement officials, government officials, and bank CEOs.

When you feed a database with enough data, you will indeed be able to predict certain things in a statistical manner. I see nothing wrong with that. It could however also backfire. Imagine criminals got access to the software and parts of the data. They could plan their next heist in the area deemed highly unlikely for crime by the program, meaning that most likely no police will be in the vicinity.

reply to post by H1ght3chHippie


They could do that now, but the criminals are either bound by geographical limitations (no transportation), or they are too stupid to realize all the cops are in certain areas.

In my town, it is split into 4 quadrants, and 2 of the quadrants have double the officers on duty as the other two quadrants. At certain times of the day, there might only be 1 or 2 cops on duty in certain quadrants, and a minor misdirection disturbance could occupy them for hours, while crimes could be committed with relative ease.

Of course, rarely are criminals that intelligent or motivated to look at the big picture, instead they usually just commit crimes of opportunity and get caught routinely.

Only the stupid criminals get caught.

Check out this older thread of mine, OP...
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Former Mossad and IDF goons are running security at our international transportation hubs with software they literally equate to 'pre-crime'.

reply to post by Jerisa


You're not just musing where this could lead to, because there is no possible way anyone can create a machine that will predict WHO will commit a crime. Not in your life time, nor your children's life time. What that movie you were talking about, and you, were predicting is nonsense fearmongering.

I find myself wondering if these are the same statisticians who can tell us who won the presidential elections with only a half percent of the vote in?

I wonder if the statistical tools used are the same ones that told the people of Japan and TEPCO that building a nuclear reactor cluster over a fault line in a flood zone was an "acceptable" risk?

Could these have been the same statistics that pronounced that Vioxx was a safe drug, that smoking didn't "cause" cancer, that overweight people are more at risk of death than skinny people?

Statistical analysis provides only "possibilities" not reality... and where we operate on the assumption that a possibility is a reality we will find some of the worst abuses in our society.

Unless of course every policeman is a humanitarian at heart, willing to accept an individual's presumption of innocence before applying force "just in case."

It's not the rule that is the problem with statistics... it's believing that 'exceptions' don't matter.

Statistics is what brings us the treacherous 'gambling' in financial markets where only "we" lose. But this is different - how?

Originally posted by cetaphobic
reply to post by Jerisa

 

You're not just musing where this could lead to, because there is no possible way anyone can create a machine that will predict WHO will commit a crime. Not in your life time, nor your children's life time. What that movie you were talking about, and you, were predicting is nonsense fearmongering.

Why not?

We already do profiling. We study criminals. We have juvenile records. We know trigger mechanisms. Suppose someone with a juvie record, and and a rough childhood, and a proclivity for violence, is suddenly part of a custody battle and divorce?

I don't think it is a good idea, but that doesn't mean we couldn't have limited success in predicting behavior. Of course, we would be wrong sometimes, and that is why we shouldn't do it, but I think creating the machine to predict who are the most likely to commit crimes is very similar to creating the machine predicting where those crimes might happen.

And, if we have BOTH machines, it might be really, really useful. It might also be really, really draconian and Orwellish!

We are already in the world of precrime "minority report" style policing.

What is the purpose of a speeding ticket? You haven't hurt yourself or anyone else. You haven't taken away anything from anyone else. Speeding tickets are a form of policing through PRE crime. I get fined (or even arrested) because I "might" hurt someone else.

There are a mayrid of precrime offenses that can get you as little as a slap on the wrist all the way to landing you in prison for the rest of your life. All for somthing you MIGHT do. Jaywalking, possesion of drugs, almost all traffic violations, and a theres tons more.

Everyone should (re)watch Minority Report and think about how our world today already resembles the movie. Minus the jet packs and flying cars ofcourse

Reply to post by getreadyalready

There is no way that would work, there are too many factors involved when an individual is making a decision to commit or not commit a crime. You can look at an area that has a lot of crime and conclude with statistics that more crime will probably happen in that area. But you cant take millions of people and account for all the varibles affecting their lives currently and in the past to try and guess who will commit a crime. It wont work, people are too complicated.


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

reply to post by Maxmars


There's an old saying, "Statistics don't lie, only the people who use them do.", that came to mind when I read your post.

10 bucks says that someone just took a red sharpie to a map and highlighted the black and mexican neighborhoods.

reply to post by Jerisa

I think it's worse to setup fake prostitutes on the street to nab lonely men. That's the worst kind of predictive crime because the crime might never have happened if it wasn't staged. I mean, the people doing the undercover work not only get money from the work they do but they also have a burning desire to arrest bad guys. In my humble opinion, it's out of control. Whether they setup fake dope dealers or whatever, it's the same thing to me. My opinion is that until a crime actually happens or is in its early stages and is not incited by authorities, any prosecution of a crime is suspect. We should instead focus on getting prostitutes off streets and to figure out how to discourage men. Do this without playing god. Without actors. Let the REAL crimes unearth from the chaos out there.

Now back onto the topic of hte program they use...

The program they mention is just giving them a heads up about what to expect from the numbers. It reminds me of an article I read about terrorist incidences and how they occur in special patterns. It was the July/August 2010 issue of Discover. The article follows Neil Johnson, a University of Miami physicist. It says he studies complexity. That doesn't mean much on its own. A lot of things are complex. But this kind of complexity has to do with how things mathematically behave in nature. So he's one - of a number of others - who studies various patterns in nature and utilizes graphs and models and math to explain them. The article also names people like him Quantitative Analysts. Neil's research into explaining warfare-type events is focused on in the article.

They discovered that terrorist events follow a power law curve and act like the rise and fall of the stock market. There're other events in nature that follow a similar pattern: weather events, income distribution, power outages, earthquakes, etc.The lack of a central command is a big part of the reason terrorist and insurgent groups behave in this manner. So what does this tell military strategic planners? It tells them that they cannot approach terrorism the same way that they approach conventional warfare against an enemy with a central command.

These kinds of things cannot tell you who will specifically commit a crime, but they can help you to have the right set of expectations and to approach a problem with better insight of its nature.

reply to post by Jerisa


Utter BS. There is no freedom in not being allowed to fail before intervention.

Originally posted by DavidWillts
10 bucks says that someone just took a red sharpie to a map and highlighted the black and mexican neighborhoods.

No, that was the old way. Now they program a computer to look at census data, school performance, crime reports, and the computer automatically outlines the black and mexican neighborhoods, and/or trailer parks.