The the software is named precobs in reference to minority reports precogs let's me believe their marketing team is hired from people selling penis enlargement on the internet. Perhaps they are just smarter because they know how often people are inclined to buy bullshit.
But, it turns out, what had actually happened was they had changed the standard for sirens on emergency vehicles. As vehicles were modernised they all started to sound like police cars. At the same time a new system for medical emergencies was introduced that involved a first response by motorbike paramedic followed by backup a bit later from an ambulance if necessary, again all with sirens blaring. Suddenly it sounded like the police where rushing everywhere all the time. Whereas before you could tell the difference between a fire engine, an ambulance and a police car from the sound so you could tell what kind of incident was going on.
I'm sure that contributed to a sense that there was a big crime problem in the 90's when in actual fact it was starting to tail off.
In some cases the error rates need to be so low, that even claims like "we are 99.9% accurate" should be taken with a big crystalline block of salt.
Remember this whenever terrorism is used as a reason why we desparetely need these surveillance mechanisms. If burglars are rare, terrorists are even rarer. The proposed systems are good for bigger things like demonstrations, social movements etc. but they suck at detecting terrorism, unless you have a metric ton of personal which will look at false positives all day long.
Ironically this is actually true. The question is to what level you want crime to fall, and if the answer is zero, then you best let the police shoot every last person without requiring them to have committed a crime.
But once you have decent policing, I can believe other factors dominate.
Because crime dropped almost 90%.
A major global factor is likely the introduction of lead free gasoline.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposur...
This is totally false.
Here's a far-left VOX article even brandishing the idea [1]
Policing practices, particularly the number of police and their tactics have an enormous effect on crime.
Obviously, social systems do as well, but there are plenty of very poor places with very little crime.
[1] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/h...
Bending reality to fit one’s political worldview.
At the risk of making a low-quality observation: the name of the software feels like it stands for "precognition [is] bullshit".