Predictive policing software terrible at predicting crimes
This story is so far down the argument about crime, it&#x27;s ridiculous.  This is my interpretation of what&#x27;s going on:<p>stage 1: Most people know where the dangerous neighborhoods are.  Police know this, locals know this, and police send patrols there, or they avoid the area and leave poor&#x2F;minorities to fend for themselves.<p>stage 2: Someone runs the query: &quot;select race_distribution from patrol_history&quot; and finds police patrol certain racial areas more or less, and sues the department.  Media simultaneously writes stories like &quot;Police are harassing the population from group X&quot; or &quot;Police are abandoning protecting X areas&quot;. So the police look for &quot;scientific&quot; methods to choose where to dispatch officers since they can&#x27;t put down on paper what everyone knows - that the rent-controlled&#x2F;low wage&#x2F;etc areas are dangerous.  After all, most victims of crime here are locals - random kids, storekeepers, innocent people, people mistaken for someone else, or killed to show bravado.<p>stage 3: The software looks at obvious things like past history of crime, arrests, poverty, drug use detected in water, low academic achievement, gunshot detection devices<i>, etc. It&#x27;s </i>all* correlated.  So it finds the thing everyone knew - that certain areas of cities have much more open crime, and it would actually do good to increase the feeling of security around there, scare off drug dealers and people with warrants etc.  So they send police to those areas; Either to harass the people, exploit them, or to help protect them.  Both cases happen - i.e. in Ferguson, the police were using street crime as an excuse to harass and ticket local minorities in a disproportionate way (according to the justice dep&#x27;t investigation). But, there also actually was a lot more genuine violent crime there (which they police may not have even been helping out with).  And in other cities, police are correctly going to areas which need protection, and are wanted by the majority of the local population. See surveys on high rates of minorities saying they actually want more police protection, referenced in the book Ghettoside by Jill Levoy; white liberals typically are more anti-police than black people actually living in the dangerous areas.  But either way, the media can spin it as a negative - both under- and over- policing.<p>stage 4: activists &quot;debunk&quot; the crime prediction software, but if you read the debunking, it&#x27;s obvious motivated BS.  None of this is necessary. Take a video camera to the tenderloin and look at the state of the people. I don&#x27;t need a PhD to know that this is a dangerous area for theft, violence, disease, etc.<p>In the end, nobody can admit that some areas need police more than others right now. It doesn&#x27;t have to be that way forever, but it is the case now. Same way a high school needs at least one or two security officers, but an elementary school doesn&#x27;t.  Rather than fight to deny reality, how about we figure out how to stop lying to ourselves about what&#x27;s going on, and then get to work helping and protecting the kids who are trying to make it out of there, and immigrants who have no other place to live?  The book Ghettoside is highly recommended. It&#x27;s the story of a liberal journalist who works with a right-wing coded white detective in LA who nevertheless passionately works against the police&#x27;s internal system, and the local black population&#x27;s reasonable reluctance to trust him and testify, to find the black killer of the child of his fellow detective, a black man.  I learned a lot from this - things aren&#x27;t just a case of &quot;evil police &amp; good locals&quot; or the right-wing stereotyped &quot;evil poor and good police&quot; view. Both views miss the more realistic description: that the police abandoned protecting black people for a long time; black communities started to hate &amp; distrust the police for this &amp; other reasons. And so now, they are left without a good means to protect themselves except via local cultural behavior (bravado, vigilantism, etc.)  So the book is a call to greatly <i>improve</i> the protection black communities receive, with their own involvement, so that they do not have to do their own self-defense anymore.<p>* yes, there are lots of articles which claim &quot;gunshot detection devices&quot; are racist.  It&#x27;s hard for me to see that view, but if you refuse to admit that some areas are actually more dangerous than others, your only way out is to attack all reports and data that suggests it.<p>** I mention blacks but I&#x27;m actually making a cultural argument; if you look at culture in Appalachia, you see the same thing in whites.  Groups which don&#x27;t feel like part of the majority and are left to their own internal justice systems tend to have more violence, because the systems are  underground and covert. This applies regardless of race.  e.g. look at crime differences between Appalachian areas and the rest of Virginia.  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cityrating.com&#x2F;crime-statistics&#x2F;virginia&#x2F;appalachia.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cityrating.com&#x2F;crime-statistics&#x2F;virginia&#x2F;appalac...</a>