I thought this was an excellent treatment of the garbage-in-garbage-out aspect of this debate. Too often it seems people get wrapped up in the "Is it ethical to use a computer to judge someone?" implications, which are non-trivial, but also seem to be borne out of a general ignorance about the many ways we do allow computers (or rather, computation) to make judgements about people.
Also, it's an excellent example of the power of research and tabulation, though it seems the link to the list of departments they researched is broken.
I think the use of crime modeling doesn't have to be controversial, but the first step is demanding transparency. It's scary enough when the police are the primary collectors and judgers of data, but even worse when they leave it to a vendor and assume it's hunky-dory out of the circular reasoning that proprietary algorithms are good because they are proprietary.
> When the Fresno police briefed the city council about the Beware system, the council president asked a simple question about those color-coded threat levels: “How does a person get to red?” The officer didn’t know, because the vendor wasn’t saying. As the officer delivering the briefing explained: “We don’t know what their algorithm is exactly… We don’t have any kind of a list that will tell us, this is their criteria, this is what would make a person red, this is what would make a person yellow. It’s their own system
Aren't there numerous ML techniques potentially be applicable to evaluating potential future crimes where even the people responsible for writing the algorithm and feeding the massive dataset in don't really understand how a particular person might "get to red"? Transparency seems to be only part of the problem.
The corollary to this: if an algorithm uses AI or machine learning to the extent that nobody precisely understands why it makes the decisions it does, it will be very difficult to change its behavior in specific cases, e.g. "make it stop doing that," especially when the inputs cannot be changed.
This is going to come up at some point when a self-driving car does something that appears totally irrational and ends up causing an accident. Engineers will need to come up with some kind of explanation, and I suspect the general public will not be satisfied when they learn that the explanation may be unknowable, or may reduce only to probability instead of certainty.
I deal with some of this at work in far more trivial use cases, and non-engineers just can't seem to accept that sometimes you cannot fix the imperfections without introducing worse imperfections in other areas of the system, and that ML generally leads to output that is "good enough" instead of perfect.
Maybe. But at least we can demand to know the system's input data and what measure(s) the training process is designed to optimize. For example, in the case of Beware, which public records are being used, and what is the benchmark for red/yellow/green? Also, are there any systems in place to try to reduce things like racial bias or the self-reinforcement effect described in the report? Why or why not?
Maybe, but I'm not aware of any that have produced predictions on a broad in vivo population that are better than existing methods. It's one thing to do a heat map of a region at a certain time of day, and express that in terms of overall statistical risk. It's quite another to try and read the future intentions of a human being based on what amounts to a wealth of noise and a paucity of signal.
The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to be controlled, on the behalf of people with no real desire to be seen as controlling them. The most the algorithm can do is provide a justification for well-known solutions to crime (or the perception of crime), but laundered through math & obfuscated reasoning so as to not be seen as too racist.
Somehow, up until like the 1960s-1970s, this was not an issue. What changed, and what reason do we have for believing that any modernized algorithmic solution would be better than now-abandoned social technologies with actual empirical track records?
Hell, the vast majority of the time, you can't even accurately describe the problem in eg Chicago without being shouted down or deflected into someone's pet policy proposal.
The problem is that the police are being asked to do what amounts to population control, of a historic problem population in the US, that has no real desire to be controlled, on the behalf of people with no real desire to be seen as controlling them. The most the algorithm can do is provide a justification for well-known solutions to crime (or the perception of crime), but laundered through math & obfuscated reasoning so as to not be seen as too racist.
Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones it?
Somehow, up until like the 1960s-1970s, this was not an issue.
Was it not an issue, or did you just not hear about it? The 1960s civil rights movement happened (and in many ways is still happening) for a reason.
Considering a group of people a "problem population" due to their race is racist, but I think this perspective is shared by many people in America. How do we get police to stop being agents of racism when so much of the population condones this sort of thing?
Blacks have ~4x the murder rate of the combined white / hispanic population, and IIRC something like 6-8x the murder rate of the disaggregated white population, depending on how exactly you segment hispanics. It ends up being approximately half of all murders. Note that this tends to be a geographically concentrated population, often next to an incredibly low-murder urban(e) white area, so you end up with cities like Chicago where the goal is to keep the anarchy from spilling over into your tax base.
It's not delusional to think that dealing with facts like this is a major area of concern for law enforcement and local political leadership, especially when people are so quick to denounce any contemplation of reality as racist.
I guess if you wanted to put on your PC goggles and studiously avoid any discussion of race, you could do the intellectually dishonest thing and talk about things like "the population of South Chicago", but being intellectually dishonest doesn't seem to have gotten us very far.
OK, so let's say people agree with you all the sudden. Now that you've framed it as a race thing, what sort of policy are you going to implement based on what you decide?
If you're going to take any kind of punitive action against people based on their race, that's not a "offending the PC police" thing, that's a human rights violation. If it's not punitive, then that's affirmative action, which you already have and has been discussed to death.
What's the point of framing the discussion around race, given that the result of going down that avenue isn't useful, and that the discussion itself is going to be bitterly divisive?
You're misunderstanding me. I am saying that the raw statistics indicate that dealing with crime in serious way requires imposing not-crime on the black population. That is just a point of fact, and Eric Holder's subordinates at least agree with me.
Mechanisms to do this run into exactly the sorts of problems you mention (all of the plausible solutions appear to be either "racist" or empirically ineffective).
There are discarded social technologies from <1970 that evidently succeeded in reducing both the black crime rate, and probably also the extent to which black crime affected whites & was thus basically ignorable. Examining those technologies in depth & figuring out what if anything is useful sort of exceeds the bounds of a tiny comment box.
But let's please get accurate diagnoses first of the decision calculus facing, say, Rahm Emanuel as he decides what policies to implement, and why he doesn't seem to be able to crack the problem.
Giuliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York, but he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks, avoid effective criticism due to his protection of large swathes of the media community, import replacement populations to drive out his more troublesome constituents, finance it via a boom in his city's FIRE economy, etc. It's not clear that that would work in, say, Detroit, or that those policies were in retrospect conformal with contemporary ethics.
Men commit more crimes than women. Do you think we should eliminate freedom of movement for men? "Import replacement populations" of women to drive them out?
The reasons people commit crimes are complex. Visible attributes like skin color or gender do not cause people to commit crime, and using statistics to argue this is incorrect and racist.
For whatever reason you're refusing to engage with the existence of black crime as a problem, and deflecting to whether I secretly believe in particular causal mechanisms or am arguing for heresy. In fact I've been clear in not advocating for particular causes. I've also been clear in not advocating an Emperor Giuliani solution.
It rather reinforces my point that there is unlikely to be a good solution to the problem when the response to pointing out very simple and agreed-upon statistics about black crime, and that any solution would presumably disproportionately affect blacks - is to point and shout "racist". That's what I'm saying. A solution to vastly disproportionate black crime would probably be, ipso facto, racist.
Incidentally, I agree with you that men commit essentially all violence, to say nothing of violent crime. There's pretty much societal consensus that measures disproportionately targeting male crime are A-OK, eg, the fact that young men are far more likely to be stopped by the police than young women, or disparities in sentencing between male and female crime, or the use of sex-offender registries, etc.
In fact management of large groups of men has been a concern for literally millennia. For instance, maintaining order in militaries, or in prisons, or managing boomtowns. "Import women" has been a solution (promoting female immigration to boomtowns, or brothels and baggage trains in <1900 militaries), as has been the imposition of hierarchies with recursive responsibility for enforcing order (militaries in general & prisons) or sequestering violence from the population at large (prisons & to some extent militaries). We've actually gotten pretty good at it through the use of social technologies we haven't thrown away.
Guiliani was able to mostly solve the problem in New York... he was able to do things like eliminate freedom of movement for blacks
Where do I even begin with this?
Let's ignore for just a second the part where you seem to label black people a "problem population".
Praise for any public policy that restricts citizens' rights specifically on the basis of race must be rejected outright. There are ways to fight crime without trampling on the rights of law abiding citizens.
What disturbs me most is that you don't even seem to realize that your example of Guiliani's supposedly successful crime policy is an almost textbook definition of institutionalized discrimination. As an African American living in Manhattan the policies you advocate are obviously objectionable to me.
Behind the "Modest Proposal" rhetoric in your posts rests the belief that it's somehow defensible to limit the rights of black people (or any population) based on a greater prevalence of crime.
Let's ignore for just a second the part where you seem to label black people a "problem population".
Let's not. I don't "seem to", it's kind of the crux of my argument (see below). Do you not think it's fair to describe the situation on the south side of chicago as "a problem"? Are there hordes of rogue Ents pillaging it, or is it maybe the local population's actions?
Praise for any public policy that restricts citizens' rights specifically on the basis of race must be rejected outright
"Praise for", or "assessment of"? I'm only doing the latter here.
There are ways to fight crime without trampling on the rights of law abiding citizens.
Effective ways? If you've cracked the case, stop writing immediately and call up Mayor Rahm; your Nobel awaits you.
What disturbs me most is that you don't even seem to realize that your example of Guiliani's supposedly successful crime policy is an almost textbook definition of institutionalized discrimination
No, I get that. I explicitly labeled those efforts as an example of institutionalized suppression of a problem population, which I in turn labeled as unethical given the current regime.
My syllogism is simple.
1) Crime is primarily a problem of non-asian minority populations
2) Efforts to target that crime would need to focus on that population, either explicitly, or via an algorithm laundering the inference (eg, the sorts of algorithms in the actual article)
3) But that would be racist
4) So they won't be done under the present regime
5) Somehow they solved it in the past though. We should understand the mechanisms in case they are useful. Further Study Needed.
Inability to distinguish advocacy for assessment makes polite conversation difficult. I can't figure out why I should care that you're black, or that a policy would be objectionable to you specifically. I can think of 500 reasons and counting in Chicago alone to contemplate nexuses of crime, why we are currently institutionally unable to pursue empirically successful solutions, and if there are alternate mechanisms for doing so.
>1) Crime is primarily a problem of non-asian minority populations
Which crimes? Are we talking murder and rape, or tax evasion and speeding?
Let's say we are solely talking about violent crimes: it would be equally true to say that violent crime is primarily a problem of males, and it's probably true that it's a function of income levels and education as well.
Should we "restrict the movement" of men in order to reduce crime? Perhaps we should bar anyone without at least a bachelors degree from traveling more than two miles from their home without a permit?
What about demanding that anyone who earns less than 50K a year wear a GPS-monitored ankle bracelet?
I don't understand the seemingly myopic focus on race as the only variable.
I think you might be underestimating the ability of people to assess the situation. It's not like people aren't aware of these options. They rather have good reasons to reject them. Namely, that implementing them would mean that the state would need to commit crimes in massive numbers against the human rights of many innocent people. Committing crimes against some group of people in order to reduce the crimes committed against another group of people is kindof difficult to justify.
Well, I think you hit the nail on the head: contemporary ethics are pretty down on things like stripping constitutional rights like the freedom of movement from a group of people based on race.
A lot of people spent their lives bringing about this shift in ethics; some of them died violently for their efforts. Not having fundamental rights abrogated because you share some phenotypes with some bad people is a substantial philosophy with deep roots in the reactions to the breadth and depth of injustice that went down in the 19th and 20th centuries - much more than just "PC goggles".
My take is that if you removed all of the crimes committed by black and hispanic people, the US would still have a murder rate that is multiples of that in many other developed countries. Clearly there is some other factor - one which is objectively larger than race - that should be the top focus.
My take is that if you removed all of the crimes committed by black and hispanic people, the US would still have a murder rate that is multiples of that in many other developed countries. Clearly there is some other factor - one which is objectively larger than race - that should be the top focus.
It's on the FBI report I linked. Most other nations are leery of breaking out crime rates by ethnicity, so you have to do a bit of cross-referencing to get e.g. Euro-American vs Euro-gen pop comparisons.
Don't forget to break out the US by-ethnicity numbers so you get a comparison of, e.g., European Americans to other particularly euro populations. For instance, US murder rate is about double that of Canada, but Euro population is ~at par.
I didn't forget. By your numbers blacks account for half of the murders. So take the US's 3.9 and divide it by half = 1.95. Compare that to Spain (which is full of hispanics, just to elimate that as a confounding variable) at 0.7, which has a 2.8 times lower murder rate than the US non-black population.
My confusion with this logic and the reason I'm suspicious about this is that this logic seems to be only applied to black people whenever I come across it, black people being a miniority population in the United States. I never see it applied to whites, who as far as I know have a track record of committing mass murders and school shootings or males who as far as I know have a track record of sexual assaults and violent crime.
But this logic around demographics and crime and how one needs to view demographics as simply more of a problem only seems to apply to black people. I'm not denying the logic or crying for the pc police. I just don't understand why it doesnt seem to be applied anywhere else.
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgements. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."
Seriously though, how is this not the crudest sort of cargo-cult machine worship? I'm not paying taxes to be judged by a goddamned machine. It's crazy. If the people we're paying to administer the system are so degenerate that they would delegate their most essential function to a machine then we need to vote them out in favor of sober, responsible, educated adults. It's like they're admitting that they can be replaced by a script!!!
Knowing what I know about computers, and computer modelling, I'm appalled that people would make, buy, and employ these sorts of "voo-doo" machines.
(Thin sans-serif body font means you hate your readers, and making it grey means you really hate them.)
> I'm not paying taxes to be judged by a goddamned machine
I'd be shocked to learn that the IRS does not use some form of mechanical computation to determine probabilistically whether or not a given taxpayer should be audited for possible tax fraud in a given year.
Maybe so, I'm not privy to their methods, but I wouldn't be surprised that they use, e.g. statistical models, computed on machines, to help them figure out whether or not to look more closely at a given taxpayer.
But however unpleasant it may be, an audit is not a punishment. (Someone is abusing their power if so.) Not anymore than being selected for jury duty is a punishment.
Also, you used the word "probabilistically". We should not be assigning sentences based on the roll of a die, eh?
Insurance companies use machines and statistical models to set rates. But they also have strong feedback to improve accuracy. They lose money if they get it wrong.
Here we are talking about judgement.
I know far too much about computers to ever credit the idea that these machines can replace a human judge. The people who have put these things into practice are deeply incompetent and should be voted out of office and replaced by folks who won't devolve to crude machine-worship.
> Also, you used the word "probabilistically". We should not be assigning sentences based on the roll of a die, eh?
Probability is not "roll of a die", it is how reasoning actually works. Human judgement is nothing but a heuristic-driven, semi-conscious probability calculation. When you have data that's more quantified than "vague gut feeling", doing things the right, formal, explicit way leads to better results - that's why machines are getting much better at reasoning than humans already.
So if IRS wasn't using probabilistic models to decide whom to audit, I'd say they'd be sucking at their jobs.
With respect and affection "Human judgement is nothing but a heuristic-driven, semi-conscious probability calculation." is a statement of faith, not an established fact. (How would you establish it?)
Machines don't reason, they compute. It's not the same thing at all. We can reason about things that cannot be represented in any symbolic fashion. Put another way, no machine can tell you: which schools to attend, whether to marry that person, what to have for lunch, the optimal route to work.
Deciding whom to audit is different than deciding how long you should stay in jail.
An audit may not be a punishment, technically speaking, but neither is being predictively policed, technically. Neither is being stopped for a brief patdown because a suspect in an armed robbery is black and you happen to be black and within the vicinity.
The latter situation is most definitely an algorithm whether it be administered by a computer or human -- e.g. 1. is there a person in front of me. 2. Is this person male? 3. Is this person dark-skinned? 4. Is this person within X meters and inside a timeframe of Y minutes from a reported crime?
As for making judgments probabilistically; hate to break it to you, but that's already the status quo. Exhibit A: Probable cause.
And probabilistic thinking is most definitely behind sentencing guidelines. Let's take the recent and still controversial case of Brock Turner, the ex-Stanford swimmer convicted of sexual assault [0].
Aren't the following aspects of the Turner case all a manifestation of probabilities?
0. That his bail was set at $150,000, based on the likelihood of an accused (and not yet guilty) rapist of his status would break bond.
0.5 The likelihood that he did indeed sexually assault the victim and was not ignorant as to her state of consciousness or consent.
1. The recommended minimum sentence of 2 years in prison for his convicted crime.
2. The probation officer's recommendation that he be given a "moderate" county jail sentence.
3. The judge's determination that Turner, based on his lack of prior criminal record, be given 6 months in county jail.
4. The county jail's determination that Turner serve only 3 months in county jail because of good behavior.
5. The post-incarceration penalty that comes with Turner to be thought of as a Tier III sex offender, which means he has to register 4 times a year (presumably based on some statistic that that's enough polling frequency to adequately track him), for the rest of his life.
Note: I'm not implying that you agree with any of these aspects of the case. Just saying that if you're concerned about statistics and likelihood playing a part in our criminal system, then that ship has long sailed. In defense of the machines, if a machine had been the sole determiner of Turner's sentence, we'd at least be able to audit it and know how it weighted things. With the human judge, we don't have a clue as to whether the judge's personal relationship with Stanford was a factor, or even if he read the probation officer's report correctly when giving the seemingly light sentence. Hell, we don't even know how the probation officer interpreted the victim's wishes [1]
I don't think that anyone is proposing a transparent algorithm that can be audited. They're all proposing trendy, proprietary machine learning techniques sold as AI. If you're just talking about boring transparent algorithms, we've always had the technology to devise them - it's called pen and paper. Mandatory Minimum sentences and Three Strikes laws are clearly punishment algorithms.
The point you're making about the Brock Turner case is well taken; the judge was another standout Stanford athlete in a sport that doesn't have a professional level. My guess is that these algorithms won't be devised by poor black people who dropped out of high school, but they will have a lot to say about how much worse poor black people who dropped out of high school are than people from the demographics of the people who do devise them.
It's also important to note that the algorithms today cannot be audited seriously. We know, for example, that many municipalities have been caught installing red light cameras and then adjusting the yellow light timing to maximize revenue rather than maximize commuter safety. We know that some laws, particularly drug laws, have consequences designed to punish "undesirable groups" (minorities) rather than make streets safer or protect the lives of citizens. So having pseudo-AI that is also a black box isn't necessarily worse than what we have today. Because as of today we can't really audit the algorithm itself, only its output.
Sorry, you said earlier that you were someone who understood computers well enough to know that you would never want one to replace human judgment in matters of justice. I thought you'd be interested in knowing that computation (delegated to machines for efficiency and consistency) is actually part of the justice system. The Bureau of Prisons has a department that is named, "Designation and Sentence Computation Center".
Maybe they don't actually use physical computers to perform the computation (though that'd be a bit weird if they didn't), but I think that's an irrelevant implementation detail as the Supreme Court has upheld the use of an unyielding mathematical formula to determine the length of a prisoner's sentence:
Hmm, well, IMHO that's all bad too. Not sure what, if anything, to do about it.
This doesn't seem as bad as the OP, but it's still an abdication of responsibility. Automated authority.
Let me point out something: why are these systems being deployed to decide sentencing, as opposed to trying to figure out what will actually affect recidivism?
I haven't read about that in any of the articles on this: is anyone paying attention to e.g. whether a given sentencing policy is actually reducing crime?
I don't doubt that machines can help us understand and manage ourselves and our complex society, but this seems like machine-worship to reinforce our atavistic ideas around crime and punishment.
Mass democracy is the root of this problem. One proof is observing the way in which democratic decision-making has devolved chiefly into emotional appeals to in-group moralistic bromides. To me, the degree to which one seriously desires rational thinking as a basis for lawmaking is the degree to which one desires a reduction in the number of cooks in the kitchen.
If they did, I'd be shocked if large tax cheats weren't tailoring their cheating specifically to the algorithm, and the only people that it caught were small timers and people who made honest mistakes.
This is already the case. Humans doing judgement calls are an "algorithm" too. Moreover, there are only two algorithms you can't game - one that perfectly addresses and solves explicit and implicit aspects of the problem (impossible in practice), and one that is perfectly random.
Computer algorithms are much easier to improve than low-paid human clerks, so there's that too.
> Moreover, there are only two algorithms you can't game - one that perfectly addresses and solves explicit and implicit aspects of the problem (impossible in practice), and one that is perfectly random.
The first one is ungameable by definition. Also practically impossible to make by the very same definition - for one, we always work with imperfect information, but moreover, humans are damn good at redefining the rules of the game on the fly.
The second one follows the principle of American Army - "If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions". A purely random selection cannot be gamed directly because it doesn't change its behavior in response to external input. However, it certainly can be meta-gamed; e.g. some people could take advantage from the very fact such algorithm is used in the first place. This circles back to the same point I made about the "perfect" algorithm - humans are just too damn good at metagaming.
Still - my primary point was that a) humans are a gameable algorithm too, and b) humans are pretty low-hanging fruit as algorithms go. We can, and should, do better.
I believe the two cases are provided (perfect algorithm and random algorithm) exhaust the list of ungameable ones (though they're still meta-gameable).
I would be. I would find it much more likely that the IRS uses some sort of much cruder algorithm in tax auditing, which is what is intended to detect fraud and appears to be non-functional at this point.
Remove the scary word "algorithm" and this whole issue seems blown up around something fairly mundane. If the police hand calculated how many crime reports came from each area no one would care.
People are so scared of algorithms. There is now scientific evidence confirming that severe distrust of algorithms is a pervasive human bias. Search for "algorithm aversion". They do trust them when they are believed to be infallible, but as soon as they learn they can make mistakes, they vastly underestimate them. And this is a damn shame, because in almost every case even very simple statistical procedures outperform human "experts".
Worse is this nonsense that algorithms can be "racist". As if a computer can have prejudice or care about anything other than maximizing accuracy. The media loves to fuel this narrative. E.g. the big hoopla when Google's image tagger tagged a black person as a gorilla. They had to remove it and apologize.
Wow, cool! I am the technical founder of PredPol and he uses a screenshot of the original version, which I wrote in my college dorm room in his article. Somehow the fact that somebody took so much time to criticize it somehow makes me feel special. (I don't work there an
"The fact that we even call these systems “predictive” is itself a telling sign of excessive confidence in the systems."
If you are worried about the outcome of the language in police intervention and court cases then "Speculative policing" would seem a more appropriate term for the technology and cary less weight. This might be an area suited for the FTC to step in and ask the industry to fix their marketing to be more inline with what they actually offer.
I like that they begin by addressing the use of the word "predictive". How we frame an issue deeply effects how it is received, perceived, and accepted.
Possible heretical thought, could it be that predictive policing suggests the same high crime neighborhoods that are normally responsible for most crime, because they are responsible for most crime (at least the kind that the systems track)?
That would make them useless, true, but not racists (most of these neighborhoods would probably be predominately african-american, but they would also be predominately poor, which we know correlates with crime).
I'm confused by this argument; how does predictive policing relate to measuring department performance? The biggest concern I can see is that putting more police in certain neighborhoods will bias the input data for those models (presumably police reports), but this doesn't seem to be what this section of the article is saying. It also doesn't seem like a good reason to avoid computer models, but rather to increase transparency.
A predictive policy generally implies an expected outcome, such as: in an area with this kind of demographic, income level, history, etc, etc., we should expect to see X number of drug and weapon possession offenders.
If a precinct ends up arresting significantly fewer people for these offenses, then it can be interpreted that the precinct is underpeforming when it comes to patrolling and finding probable cause to stop and search.
Ira Glass:
The atmosphere at the 81st precinct was set by its commander, Stephen Mauriello. When Mauriello showed up, Adrian Schoolcraft says, things changed. Offices were told to write more tickets, do more stop-and-frisks, arrest more people for low level offenses that they might otherwise let go-- get their numbers up.
Adrian Schoolcraft
The pressure definitely increased when he arrived and took over as the commanding officer. The analogy I would uses is like having a boot to the back of your heel. It is do this or else. The rent's due.
Ira Glass
The rent's due?
Adrian Schoolcraft
The rent is due. Pay the rent. Did you pay the rent last month?
Ira Glass
Pay the rent means did you get your numbers?
I don't think it's correct to criticize your line of thinking as "heretical", but I would criticize it for being overly simplistic to how policing works in the real world.
For easy starters, as the OP itself mentions, while the people (via government) define what is unlawful behavior, the incidence of crime is defined by police, who choose to observe and act on alleged law-breaking.
The obvious example are things like rape. When Baltimore's number of rape cases dropped 80 percent in a 15 year period, was it because Baltimore city had made stopping sexual assaults a priority? [0] When Florida police claimed that a viral video of an excessively-speeding off-duty cop was just an anomaly, and according to their traffic stats division, the number of police officers who speed (outside of work) is far, far lower than it is among the general population, who could argue otherwise? [1]. And what should we make of a department that disagrees with the non-harshness of its own audit on felony statistics? [2]
But even if we move on to crimes of a more concrete nature, such as homicide and shootings, the case that the OP argues is that predictive measures that aim to interdict these serious, unambiguous crimes not only are questionable from a civil rights impact, but seem to fail at having a significant impact in the crime rate.
We don't even have to think about particularly sophisticated models: the NYPD justified its stop-and-frisk policies, which disproportionately targeted blacks, on the generally agreed upon assumption that blacks make up a disproportionate number of suspects in criminal cases. The Adrian Schoolcraft tapes [3] revealed how the department's unquestioning interpretation of data that, regardless of the validity of the foundational statistics, resulted in extremely unfair quotas, the kind of practices that make obvious the NYPD's unwitting collaboration with the black population to create a culture that is hostile towards police.
(And how is Officer Schoolcraft doing? He recently settled a lawsuit against the NYPD for committing him to a psych ward under false pretenses. [4])
But hell, let's think of the most accurate and simple-to-explain crime-detecting algorithm there is: red-light cameras and radar guns. I'll assume I don't need to provide citations for how this form of policing has been criticized over the years, or how the loudest critics aren't all just black folks, as it's pretty easy enough to find stories and documentation via Google.
I didn't mean it as a derogatory term. I mean mostly that I assume that the data and methodology is sound (because it seems straightforward to calculate). But my main contention is not only if that data justifies targeting blacks disproportionately for stops and frisks, but whether that increased targeting can be implemented in a way that doesn't ultimately lead to a bad feedback situation and/or quotas that lead to arbitrary searching, as the Schoolcraft situation exposed.
And there's the question of whether or not it reduces crime, and if it does, does it at a rate that exceeds the rate of increased mistrust in society, the kind of mistrust that often fosters law breaking behavior.
One could also argue: do black communities commit more crime or is it just enforced more in black communities due to more police presence, etc...
I'm not aware of any conclusive data that shows that black people are more predisposed to commit crime even if the outcome is higher crime rates in black communities.
There is clear and conclusive evidence that black people commit violent crime at a higher rate than white people in the United States [1]. Arguments that arrests are not representative of true crime are not based in sound statistical arguments, for crimes such as murder, there is no plausible argument that police are 6 times as likely to arrest a black criminal for murder than a white criminal. If anything police would investigate murders of white people more seriously as shown by the rate of unsolved murders by state [2], but the magnitude of this effect isn't enough to explain the discrepancy even if you assume that all unsolved murders are committed by white people, as only about 33% of murders go unsolved on average.
Given that crime is strongly correlated with poverty, and being black is also strongly correlated with poverty in the United States, it would be very surprising if black people did not commit more crime.
Biased humans program systems, biased humans collect data, biased humans feed systems data, biased humans purchase systems that affirm their biases, biased humans point at the black boxes as a confirmation for their bias. How can a black box be wrong? After all, it is a computer and it is not influenced by bias like a human.
Would you rather have a biased human attempt to make data-driven, statistically based, decisions, or a biased human make decisions based on whatever they feel like? Either way there will be bias in the system. You don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to faster than your friend.
I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.
And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.
[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.
I can't speak for the progressives that you have read from, but I can say that there is strong movement on the conservative front for criminal justice reform. Here's a good op-ed by Doug Deason:
His first anecdote gets at the issue to which I believe you misattribute to progressives, "actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime":
> I am a Republican businessman, and President Obama and I do not see eye to eye on most issues. But I agree with him on the inequities of the criminal justice system. I learned about it firsthand. Like many 17-year-olds, I did something stupid. It was 1979, and I threw a party at the home of neighbors while they were out of town. (Their son had given me a key.) The party got out of hand, ultimately getting the attention of the police. I was charged with felony burglary.
> My actions were wrong and irresponsible. They could also have ruined my life, affecting my ability to go to college or even get a job. But unlike many in my situation, I was able to fight the charge.
Perhaps the progressives you accuse of deliberately spreading ignorance, are indeed not focusing on the "basic facts". But they might argue that that focus is flawed in the first place. If blacks were disproportionately targeted and punished for low-level offenses, then that leads to a disproportionate number of people who have criminal records. Even if you ignore the material impact of incarceration, there's the issue of how criminal record can be a negative factor in job searches and overall participation and trust in society.
The basic fact that a greater proportion of blacks commit serious felonies is probably not considered a basic fact for folks who believe that blacks have also a greater proportion of being disenfranchised. It's probably more like a tautology.
Omitting the distinction between being a convicted criminal and being a criminal is what makes your statement racist, and non-factual.
We don't have any sure mechanism to determine the incidence of criminal activity in the general population. Most rigorous academic analysis I have seen shows no statistically significant difference in criminal activity between races. (Which is in contrast to convicted criminals.)
Also, it's an excellent example of the power of research and tabulation, though it seems the link to the list of departments they researched is broken.
I think the use of crime modeling doesn't have to be controversial, but the first step is demanding transparency. It's scary enough when the police are the primary collectors and judgers of data, but even worse when they leave it to a vendor and assume it's hunky-dory out of the circular reasoning that proprietary algorithms are good because they are proprietary.
> When the Fresno police briefed the city council about the Beware system, the council president asked a simple question about those color-coded threat levels: “How does a person get to red?” The officer didn’t know, because the vendor wasn’t saying. As the officer delivering the briefing explained: “We don’t know what their algorithm is exactly… We don’t have any kind of a list that will tell us, this is their criteria, this is what would make a person red, this is what would make a person yellow. It’s their own system