Early evidence on “predictive policing” and civil rights
teamupturn.com
teamupturn.com
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
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.
Outside of a 50's-style sci-fi utopia, I simply can't see how. What we consider a crime worth pursuing is, alone, a hugely difficult conversation.
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.
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.
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.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/09/06/chicago-hits-5...
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.
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.
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.
That's inaccurate. The European population in America has a crime rate inline with or a bit lower than European populations in Europe, certainly not "multiples". http://www.unicri.it/services/library_documentation/publicat...
Where are you finding the US crime rate by ethnicity? I haven't read all 283 pages of the doc you linked, but a more direct reference would be great.
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.
- Can you guarantee that there is no better (i.e., stronger correlated) predictor for murder rate than skin color?
- How far behind in strength of correlation is the next-best predictor, and what is it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[0] http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/news/crime-law/greene-co...
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/probation-official-called-brock-...
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.
What's your angle?
For me, it's really simple: The day that a machine decides how long I spend in a cage we are going to have a serious problem.
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:
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.
I'm glad some people put the effort in rather than just chasing positive feels.
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.
Rationality can lead you astray, you have to listen to your heart.
Emotions can lead you astray, you have to listen to your head.
If every audit was accompanied by a check for $3000 or so, a large portion of the people audited would feel neutral about the process.
Computer algorithms are much easier to improve than low-paid human clerks, so there's that too.
Care to explain?
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.
[0] - http://www.allproudamericans.com/paimages/here-is-why-americ...
Well yes, evidence suggests that in many cases they can be.
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.
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.
By the way, DRM is an example of such approach, where people are judged as guilty by default by digital systems.
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).
[0] https://www.teamupturn.com/reports/2016/stuck-in-a-pattern#p...
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.
I referenced Adrian Schoolcraft in another comment, but here's another retelling of his situation: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/t...
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?
Adrian Schoolcraft Correct.
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.
[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-city-rapes-gal...
[1] http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2013
[2] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-lapd-audit-assaults-20...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/stop-and-frisk-policy-n...
[4] http://gothamist.com/2015/09/30/whistleblower_cop_adrian_sch...
Do you use "assumption" here to mean "divorced from data"? Because I'm of the impression that is hardly contested in the field of criminology.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.amren.com/archives/reports/the-color-of-crime-201... [2] http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2013/01/rates-of-unsolved-murd...
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...
[1] It's not entirely uncontested, but it certainly represents the majority belief in most social science disciplines. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S....
[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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opinion/ruining-lives-with...
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.
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.)