Crime-Predicting Algorithm Outperforms Humans | Hacker News Reader

Crime-Predicting Algorithm Outperforms Humans

technologyreview.com

29 pointshardtke15 comments

Never quite understood the draw of headlines like this: "Human With Tool Outperforms Human Without Tool"

Yep. That's what humans do. Now, if you really want to catch my attention, give me a headline like this: "Humans Without Tool Completely Fail To Freak Out When New Tool Appears".

A valid point. Though, there's something to be said for having the right tool. Give me the headline "Human with shovel outperforms human without shovel at predicting crimes" and we'll talk.

> Where police used to sit in daily meetings to plan where to patrol, they can now spend more time actually out on patrol, since the computer's doing the planning.

While this is a nice application of machine learning, I can't help but wonder how much of their increase is due to the above fact.

Police being part bigger parts of their neighborhoods must be a non-negligible variable.

Even if you assume that the algorithm's quality is exactly on par with the seasoned police veterans, the fact that it's fast is a sufficient value-add by itself.

In that case, I've got an even cheaper and faster solution: Pick some points on the map randomly.

Now that I think about it, this could be used as a control.

That would actually have the added benefit of avoiding profiling.

Why is that a benefit?

Assuming both methods are equally effective, then it prevents bad PR.

I wonder what the guy who police stopped from breaking into the empty house will do? Let's say the guy stopped from a burglary for some time. He doing it by choice for a reason (has no job, hungry, does not want a job, can't find one - could be many reasons). What he will do next? Will he go into different area or try something new like killing someone? The question is will this technology applied from only one side shift the crime distribution on the map or shift it on the type of crime distribution? The real problem is not addressed. Someone just try to make some money by providing symptomatic cure.

I wonder how log it'll be until "the bad guys" start stealing/sniffing/hacking/buying each days map from the cops, so they know where it's relatively safer to commit crime?

What will be said to those who claim racial profiling by these algorithms?

Would people complain that the police are or aren't visiting their neighborhood?

Oddly enough, both.

This is not so unreasonable. In many neighborhoods, underprovision of actual police services (cf <a href="http://www.publicenemy.com/index.php?page=page5&item=3&#... Enemy</a>) is as big a problem as getting hassled for no reason.

There was previous discussion on this the other day... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185684

I think it depends on the inputs. If the algorithm looks at statistics blindly, ie. does not take into account race, then it would be more accurately called "crime profiling". So, unless people were to feel that crime should be more acceptable in some circumstances than others (i.e. a crime prone area should be allowed some low level crime because that's what people know), it should be a non-issue. I think the question is more about how the police on the ground respond, do they inject race into the the practical aspect?

It would seem that that should not change just because police are being dispatched by an automated system --what I mean, is I don't think this system should or will make beat cops more or less biased against a given ethnicity, per se. but in effect a neighborhood will get more attention and long-run, should end up in a better place, given that results show a significant improvement.

In the end, time will tell.

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