- by Sharlene Djuhari
Predictive policing uses technology and data analysis to take important measures to pre-empt crime. Sometimes called “intelligence-led policing,” the predictive policing model utilizes past data and complicated mathematical techniques to estimate and predict where future crime may take place. The data is drawn from historical crimes, social media, community input etc. Criminals cluster in certain areas and the predictive policing model detects patterns in the type and location of crimes. The new technology enables information to be rallied to officers in real time and therefore, enabling units to respond more efficiently and effectively to the threat of crime. Using the model, police departments are able to deploy extra officers to hot spot locations for crime. A simple example would be something like an officer getting information that at a particular time, in a certain location, there is a certain chance that a crime will take place. This data reliant approach to policing has become a subject of much debate, particularly with regards to our civil and private rights. If officers obtain data that estimates the chances of crime happening in a certain location to be high, does that then justify random practices like stop and frisk? And since the estimated data will likely single out certain ethnic groups, won’t the predictive policing model foster racial profiling? Is it constitutional for people to be suspected and treated like suspects for a crime that they might potentially commit? It sounds like predictive policing strategies may infringe on Fourth Amendments protections for individuals who happen to be in areas where crime is prevalent. States like New York have historically used the justification of an area having a high crime rate for stopping/frisking/questioning a non-threatening citizen. Since predictive policing will undoubtedly emphasize areas with higher crime rates, it is safe to say that people residing in those areas will “have a lesser expectation of privacy than those in other non high crime area neighborhoods.” Does the intention of fighting crime justify the intrusion onto our social media pages which are supposed to be only available to a select group of friends? What kind of policies should be set in place in order to prevent the abuse of information, or in other words, who is policing the police?
Sources:
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/predictive_policing_may_help_bag_burglars--but_it_may_also_be_a_constitutio/
http://www.americancriminallawreview.com/Drupal/blogs/blog-entry/%E2%80%9Cpredictive-policing%E2%80%9D-and-fourth-amendment-11-28-2011
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21582042-it-getting-easier-foresee-wrongdoing-and-spot-likely-wrongdoers-dont-even-think-about-it
This reminds me of the movie Minority Report. Ironically the movie played this technology off as far future fantasy, however it was quite prophetic and you can recognize many of the technologies being used today. The way I see it, such programs cast too wide a net when looking for criminals and leads to unhappy law abiding citizens who are miscast by a computer program that thinks it knows what you're going to do better than you do.
ReplyDeleteDerek Chin
Nicely written piece.
ReplyDeleteI like your soft-suggestive style of writing. You front-loaded the bulk of the information then strung together a list of questions, that sort of act as a narrative, so your opinion is there, but it's not in-your-face.
I do take contention with your conclusion though.
Firstly, I think there needs to be a more precise definition of the words "privacy," "constitutional," and "4th amendment," because generally they sort of get packaged together, as if they collectively mean that citizens are a huge number of implicit rights; the fact is that we have no presumption of privacy in the public sphere.
Secondly, predictive policing isn't that new of a concept, law enforcement have responded to areas of crime density and criminal localization for a long time. And to a large extent police should respond to crime localization.
Lastly, I find it a bit underwhelming to bundle racial profiling with intelligence-led policing, and then conclude that "smart" police are the erosion of our civil liberties.
It's sort of a hasted conclusion based largely on a casual relationship between two phenomena that don't even seem to have a correlation.
Cheers.
I look forward to your response.
Predictive policing seems to be the next step from policing through surveillance. Currently, surveillance is a method to catch wrongdoing after the fact. Once a crime has happened, it is possible to use surveillance to identify the criminal and help prosecute them. Predictive policing is crime prevention. It increases law enforcement presence in areas where it will be most effective in deterring crime. However, when taken to the extreme, predictive policing assumes guilt. Law abiding citizens who live in a high likelihood of crime area will be targeted by the police who assumes they are guilt of committing crime because of their location. They will be subject to aggressive policing policy such as in New York with the stop and frisk policy. This assumption of guilt violates our right to due process. I still feel that we should be innocent until proven guilty.
ReplyDeleteChia-Hui (Danielle) Sze
Sharlene, you've made a great point about the ability of predictive policing to give way to infringing upon one's privacy. Many of your rhetorical questions suggest to me that predictive policing undermines the image of police professionalism. The fact that once a crime has been predicted in X location by using predictive policing, the individuals near the X location are subject to stop and frisk, and may have their rights infringed upon by the police officials. As a result, these downgrades the level of professionalism in the police force. Instead of resorting to predictive policing, Sklansky argues that ""effective policing requires building trust and legitimacy; that trust and legitimacy depend heavily on fairness and decency. (11)" The repeated qualities, trust and legitimacy, are the main components that should be highlighted in police professionalism.
ReplyDelete-Jiajun (Michael) Huang.
You raise an interesting set of questions that fuse the practice of predictive policing with concerns about surveillance and the inequities that may be produced through geographical pinpointing of crime. How does the perspective you gained from your sources compare and contrast with those in the required readings -- Sklansky and Zimring? How do they frame their inquiry of this policing strategy compared to your framing? Best.
ReplyDeleteI feel that objectively using data to fight crime is one of the only ways to overcome racial profiling. They may be correlated in certain areas and the officer will still be the subjective choice on who to stop, but I believe that intelligence-based policing can help racial discrimination.
ReplyDeleteIt is also interesting to ask what is the goal of the police? If it is to reduce crime then your statement, "predictive policing will undoubtedly emphasize areas with higher crime rates" will help to achieve that goal. At the same time it is important to be aware of what we as citizens want from the police. Privacy invasion is a concern, but using data can minimize the privacy invasions on innocent individuals. Ultimately, intelligence-based policing is a work in progress and whether or not the technology is available to make it an effective policing strategy, has yet to be decided.
-Alex Rose
From what I gathered from your article, the current Predictive Policing model focuses on historical events and past data. The past is often a good source of information to base future hypotheses on, but in this case where crime and criminality is being predicted using only past evidence can only lead to biased results. Historically, more data will emphasis crime in areas of poverty and look away from 'safe' neighborhoods. Also, it is unclear exactly what kind of crime does predictive policing cover. Do corporate ponzi schemes also get factored in to the system so they can spot companies that seem to be frauding their investors? To me, it seems that predictive policing will only have the capabilities to place emphasis on the locations of physical crimes that individuals and gangs may commit, but have no ability to cover the operations of corporations and thus cannot place them under surveillance.
ReplyDelete-Shiwei (Simon) Chen
I was recently reading about gang injunctions for another class, and although some sources and data may be skewed; there is some information that Police officers in Los Angeles do not use. They use for a lack of a better term, their "gut" instincts as well as what I believe is pure stereotyping and discrimination. If crime stopping organizations or police are trying to reduce crime, the answer is in preventing it before it gets to the point where misdemeanors or felonies are done. But you cannot do this by receiving information from the wrong sources, or sources that fear you [people in areas where there are gang injunctions are questioned]. Most crime in urban areas are a result of a deprivation of people: It could be poverty, mental health, many of whom are stigmatized and ignored by society-making them rebel to survive. I agree, many of the information that is giving and exchanged perhaps is not legitimate to fix certain crimes. I just wished that these crimes mentioned were more specified, for there is a large range of crimes.
ReplyDelete-Sureyma Gonzalez
A nicely written piece. As the things like social networks become an important part of our lives they can as well be a vital source of information for the crime investigation and prevention. Police has always faced the emergence of new technologies and adapted to it. At the same time policing should not exceed certain boundaries of privacy.
ReplyDeleteAlexander Solodovnikov
I feel that social networking is definitely at the forefront of policing and surveillance of our society. I remember reading a news article about 6 months ago about a teenager being jailed after engaging in a vicious argument on Facebook over the video game League of Legends and makingextremely exaggerated comments on school shootings. While the teenager was from Texas, a woman from Canada saw the comments, tracked the teenager's contact information from Facebook, and contacted Texas authorities who then arrested the teen on charges of making a terrorist threat. I feel that although in this case the teenager may not have been serious in his "threats" and wrongly jailed. I was a little bit shocked that community policing could extend all the way to social networks and transcend even country borders. However if the threat had been real the woman would have been hailed as hero by the Texan community. This example really opened my eye on how public information posted on Facebook is and how serious implications resulting from our postings can impact our lives.
ReplyDeleteMichael Wu
It can be tricky when policing the police. Countersurveillance networks like Anonymous can attempt to disrupt surveillance technologies, but may end up actually reinforcing surveillance. In lecture Professor mentioned how Cop Watch would actually record criminal activities by citizens as much as it would police oppression. So how can policing be held accountable for abusing people's rights to privacy by targeting areas with minority communities.
ReplyDeleteTechnology’s use by the police is difficult to draw the lines of where it is appropriate and where it is overstepping the rights of individuals. While technology’s ability to track crimes in high crime areas is important to stop crime, it greatly affects individuals who live in the neighborhoods who do not partake in crimes but may look suspicious. Latino and African American youth of urban neighborhoods for example are stopped time and time again when they are simply hanging out in their neighborhood with no intentions of committing crime. This constant stop and frisk by the police causes the youth to distrust the police and even want to rebel against their authority. I do believe that the police should be able to use technology to enter personal Facebook accounts, when it is specifically being used to solve a crime, but nothing further. I have seen from various cases how Facebook has been used to effectively locate children/youth when they have gone missing and to discover the intentions of criminals which I find critical to helping save lives and solving important cases.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThank you for writing this post, Sharlene. You're right, this is a topic that is often debated. People can see that social order sometimes comes at the expense of personal liberties, a trade-off that often quotes George Orwell's 1984. Heavily populated urban places do benefit from such preventive methods of policing, methods that focus on certain areas or groups of people. However, this practice infringes on the rights of those individuals and may lead to bystanders being victimized for things they have no control over. As for the idea of policing the police, we should keep in mind that the government desires to have the best equipment and have the most power when it comes to keeping people in line (for better or worse). This means that should they find out that someone managed to find a weakness, perhaps like Snowden, the government would be quite likely to become stricter in their methods and harsher on their punishments. That wouldn't really help the situation, would it?
ReplyDelete- Jan Joseph Lugue
This is a very interesting post! If the predictive policing is using past crime data then it is safe to say that any unfair trends people have experienced in the past will be further enhanced by the predictive policing. There is one way which I believe that predictive policing may work, though. In the case of stop and frisks, although there were astonishingly more black and latino people stopped, the rate of actually finding illegal substances or weapons was about even between all races. If this data is taken into account then it should yield for an equal amount of stops between all people regardless of race.
ReplyDelete-Alex Logan