Predictive policing software is pretty terrible at predicting crimes

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I wonder if it did predict a crime, would it change how they act? Would they trust it, or would hubris prevail?

  I personally have predicted crimes to the police and been futile, and they happened.  Even had a police complaint upheld over it.

So even if you can see the patterns (be that autisticly gifted that way or by machines), it is trust/communication that is the crux. Akin to giving the answer to a math problem without showing the working out. Hence many aspects are reactive to problems with proactiveness very much an uphill battle of complacency.

The real issue though with any probability/prediction is the quality of the data, and filtering that. As always - Garbage in, Garbage out. This is born out that many police systems are old, legacy, with bolt-on's added along the way, so you can and do get data being curtailed in quality by legacy limits. Certainly, can attest to instances in my country and can imagine the story is much the same throughout more than appreciated. After all, an underfunded police is common in many countries.

Somewhat related, a couple years ago Swiss police wanted to use AI software to predict burglaries. However, there were not enough burglaries in the country to get enough training data, so the project was shelved.