While I agree that it's way too soon for this sort of granularity, is it too soon to have 10 block, increased presence of troubled areas helped by statistical analysis?
You live in a bad neighborhood, so you're more likely to get caught for something, now you're on parole, now anywhere you live is a "bad neighborhood" requiring more patrols, more likely to get caught for something. Meanwhile I can live in my entirely white suburb smoking weed and my life doesn't change.
We can lay a lot of the rotten police problem in the USA, and the world, at the fact that the accountability just isn't there.
I don't mean that if you hire someone they have to move into the district. I mean that your pool of hires is the people who have already lived in the district for a particular amount of time (years).
The locals know what laws not to enforce and how to gain the trust of the community.
That said, I agree that the smart use of such predictions should be sensitive to this. Try to predict where & when the murders will happen, use that to direct patrols (and searches for potential murder weapons). Rather than predicting something simpler like "total number of offences including parking tickets" for the sake of chasing numbers.
(Both of these comments are describing where to put patrols, i.e. where to spend a limited resource to best effect. Prediction applied to human individuals is a very different story, and much scarier.)
That doesn't seem like a strong hypothesis I would've made from the given scenario.
For example, one area that's consistent with the theory is that areas with lots of "serious crime" generate a lot of police activity, which turns up a significant amount of "observed victimless crime". That creates an expectation of a positive correlation between "serious crime" and "observed victimless crime".
Then, sure, according to that theory there might also be some areas where policing starts in an area on suspicion rather than serious crime and then we get a lot of "observed victimless crime" without as much "serious crime". That would be a negative correlation that you mentioned.
I just don't think the falsifiable hypothesis you've drawn up is one that the theory actually strongly predicts, and I don't think refuting that hypothesis necessarily refutes the theory.
The fact that you find more crime where you patrol more is such a simple concept, it hardly seems necessary to mention. And yet so many people seem to think all this police data is useful.
But lets accept for a moment that reducing the number of knives on the street reduces violence and protects innocent people. If you accept that premise, then you have to say it's beneficial to society that the police remove as many knives as possible: whenever someone gets arrested for a knife violation it's a good thing, regardless of their skin colour.
And given that we have limited enforcement resources, we should focus most in those areas with the most knife crime victims. So while i accept everything you relayed in your post, the proper conclusion would change quite a bit if there are many more victims of knife crime in the black neighbourhoods... I do not know if that is the case, and i'm not implying the answer is more likely one way or the other.
But if in fact more people are getting stabbed or robbed at knife point in black neighbourhoods and you accept that knife laws are good in general, then it's good that such laws are more strictly enforced in that area, to help protect all the innocent people in that area who might fall victim.
And this principle really is colorblind. For instance many people speed in their cars everywhere, but we should more heavily enforce speed limits near high traffic and pedestrian areas and locations where accidents keep happening.
Now, maybe the rate of knife crime is worse in white neighbourhoods, in which case it really is a miscarriage of justice that more black men are getting charged for illegal blades. But I don't think you can say one way or the other without knowing and considering that statistic.
--Same as you, just using knives as an example because I agree that they should not be illegal. (And a lot more could be said about certain types of knives being illegal and others not and the idea that certain racial groups or gangs might be more likely to carry that certain type, crack vs cocaine anyone?) But you could replace knives with any type of crime.--
But the reality is that we have a system that will over-prosecute and over-charge people for small crimes which causes a disruption to a lower income person's already precarious situation. Putting through a system full of violence, inhumanity, and other people that are in for much worse and then releasing them back to that same community with a do-not-hire sign permanently around their neck (a felony). After which they are likely to turn to crime to survive.
So while I agree that looking at knife crime data would make more sense than looking at arrests in the scope of the data conversation, the idea that heavy handed policing and a messed up "justice" system will likely create negative pressure on the long term for crime in that community, then the data is sort of moot.
Additionally, the conversation in this mini-documentary pointed to the fact that police were/are incentivized (at least in his Detroit precinct) to "get their statistics". So they would gravitate to these poorer, black neighborhoods because they could stop and hassle low income minorities without repercussion a lot easier than a white middle class neighborhood where people were less likely to even be walking outside and more likely to file complaints for police harassment.
A machine model of police deployment just makes for a more transparent model, so long as it isn't kept as a black box, or referred to as strictly "AI". If we arm our society with basic understanding of statistical maths and scientific grounding, they'll stop looking at these things as magic and relying on anecdotal experience. No offense meant.
Those patrols feel the need to justify spending all that time out there, so then they "find" crimes too. And then it just reinforces that data that that is a high risk neighborhood, making the whole thing worse.
The entire system is built on decades of bad data. Step one is cleaning up the data and/or starting over.
Combined with the evidence of extreme LEO abuse of power, doesn't this reinforce the idea that certain people/neighborhoods become disproportionately affected? Isn't this exactly what the past few weeks of protests have been railing against?