Building software to identify trends in unsolved murders | Hacker News Reader

Building software to identify trends in unsolved murders

bloomberg.com

87 pointsadventured20 comments

Does anyone know why MAP focuses on the clearance rate? It seems to conflate arresting someone with "solving" the murder.

I can think of some plausible reasons: practicality (easiest to collect, stable over time), political (if your audience is the police, basing your work on the assumption that they arrest the right guy is probably smart), standardization (is it?), etc.

Wikipedia is fairly light, but does link to a pair of articles on the criminal justice conflict vs consensus models, so it seems this is a potential can of worms.

I'm really not moved by the "resources" argument all the PDs are giving.

Investigating murders is the kind of thing you do when you've run out of meth labs to bust and black guys to beat. It's a high effort, low reward task. Of course they'd much rather cut back there than not buy everyone tazers.

The article title "Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm" is naive since psychopaths do not feel emotions like fear or empathy, or at least not spontaneously.[1]

I've tried to test a psychopath in the wild using a word association psychoanalysis method[2], but they are hard to find. Hospitals would not divulge names (no surprise there) and many psychopaths are senior corporate professionals who run successful companies.[3]

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-empathic-brain/2013...

[2] https://criticalstimulus.com/

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-p...

Your assertion that you have to be a psychopath to be a serial killer is unsupported. The unabomber was as capable of fear as the rest of us.

A serial killer who strangles women is probably a "Lust Killer" and not a psychopath.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_murder

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lust_serial_killers

> a "Lust Killer" and not a psychopath

are these exclusive notions?

Even one who is incapable of feeling fear probably should fear the means by which he could be caught.

If we're going to be pedantic, even psychopathic serial killers should fear it, even if they don't....

Anyway, hospitals certainly won't divulge patient lists to random folks off the street. However, if you're a researcher, there are definitely procedures for getting access to all kinds of patients and patient data. It certainly helps to have a relevant affiliation, if only for guidance and help with the paperwork, but if you really want to try this, I'm sure there's a way to make it happen.

They dont meen the emotion of fear. They mean the logic of avoiding something to promote your interests. Psychopaths might not feel fear, but they tend to jump out of the way of busses anyway. Fearing death is separate from not wanting to die. But a third party would say that the psycopath does fear the bus in that he still avoids it, an identical behavior to those who are truly afraid.

And regular readers should fear this headline.

We've replaced it with a phrase from the subtitle.

I feel like you build a model which you implement in software. (which runs on hardware)

Keyword: Before the fact

cynical me thinks it simply isn't profitable to them to solve murder cases unless public outcry is very high and more profitable to beat on the fear of drugs and perform seizures.

post 2010 drop could unfortunately be attributed to a hostile media and Presidency towards the police because of some overly politicized cases

Definitely there's been a reduction in trust between police departments & citizens, but I'm not sure I agree with you whose fault it is.

The drug war. #1 culprit.

Correlation strongly suggests the culprit is camera-phones.

The primary outlier in the clearing stats, is for murders involving black men. As noted in the article, for white women it's near 90%, for white men and black women it's about 76% (comparable to Canada). For black men it's 58%. The question then is, is that due to the volume of murders vs resources (black male murders overwhelmingly take place in poor locations in the inner cities, often are heavily concentrated (eg specific parts of Chicago that have murder rates comparable to the worst areas in Latin America), where police departments are stretched on resources compared to the murder rates), or is it because of who is being murdered (a bias in some regard)?

>where police departments are stretched on resources compared to the murder rates), or is it because of who is being murdered (a bias in some regard)?

Those aren't mutually exclusive nor are either exclusive compared to the effort/reward point made by the parent comment.

If there were one hundred things I could change about the political system, somewhere among them would be the insane idea of financing public services like schools/police/firefighting on the community level.

It can't be blamed exclusively here – for example I'd assume that the city of Chicago can somewhat freely allocate resources. Differences within Chicago must therefore have other causes.

But from what I've read about schools in particular, it appears that current rules were written/voted for by people who aren't just acting for purely selfish reasons. They also seem to have the time horizon of a chipmunk on speed or the CEO of a penny stock. Even if my children went to private school, and I have enough money to know their grandchildren eventually will, too, I'd consider it a good investment for my dynasty for everyone to be at least somewhat literate... That dynasty relies quite heavily on written laws, after all.

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