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Comment by tomjen3 | Hacker News Reader

Possible heretical thought, could it be that predictive policing suggests the same high crime neighborhoods that are normally responsible for most crime, because they are responsible for most crime (at least the kind that the systems track)?

That would make them useless, true, but not racists (most of these neighborhoods would probably be predominately african-american, but they would also be predominately poor, which we know correlates with crime).

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Their main argument against this is this[0]. See the quote from the expert in that subsection.

[0] https://www.teamupturn.com/reports/2016/stuck-in-a-pattern#p...

I'm confused by this argument; how does predictive policing relate to measuring department performance? The biggest concern I can see is that putting more police in certain neighborhoods will bias the input data for those models (presumably police reports), but this doesn't seem to be what this section of the article is saying. It also doesn't seem like a good reason to avoid computer models, but rather to increase transparency.

A predictive policy generally implies an expected outcome, such as: in an area with this kind of demographic, income level, history, etc, etc., we should expect to see X number of drug and weapon possession offenders.

If a precinct ends up arresting significantly fewer people for these offenses, then it can be interpreted that the precinct is underpeforming when it comes to patrolling and finding probable cause to stop and search.

I referenced Adrian Schoolcraft in another comment, but here's another retelling of his situation: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/t...

Ira Glass: The atmosphere at the 81st precinct was set by its commander, Stephen Mauriello. When Mauriello showed up, Adrian Schoolcraft says, things changed. Offices were told to write more tickets, do more stop-and-frisks, arrest more people for low level offenses that they might otherwise let go-- get their numbers up.

Adrian Schoolcraft The pressure definitely increased when he arrived and took over as the commanding officer. The analogy I would uses is like having a boot to the back of your heel. It is do this or else. The rent's due.

Ira Glass The rent's due?

Adrian Schoolcraft The rent is due. Pay the rent. Did you pay the rent last month?

Ira Glass Pay the rent means did you get your numbers?

Adrian Schoolcraft Correct.

I don't think it's correct to criticize your line of thinking as "heretical", but I would criticize it for being overly simplistic to how policing works in the real world.

For easy starters, as the OP itself mentions, while the people (via government) define what is unlawful behavior, the incidence of crime is defined by police, who choose to observe and act on alleged law-breaking.

The obvious example are things like rape. When Baltimore's number of rape cases dropped 80 percent in a 15 year period, was it because Baltimore city had made stopping sexual assaults a priority? [0] When Florida police claimed that a viral video of an excessively-speeding off-duty cop was just an anomaly, and according to their traffic stats division, the number of police officers who speed (outside of work) is far, far lower than it is among the general population, who could argue otherwise? [1]. And what should we make of a department that disagrees with the non-harshness of its own audit on felony statistics? [2]

But even if we move on to crimes of a more concrete nature, such as homicide and shootings, the case that the OP argues is that predictive measures that aim to interdict these serious, unambiguous crimes not only are questionable from a civil rights impact, but seem to fail at having a significant impact in the crime rate.

We don't even have to think about particularly sophisticated models: the NYPD justified its stop-and-frisk policies, which disproportionately targeted blacks, on the generally agreed upon assumption that blacks make up a disproportionate number of suspects in criminal cases. The Adrian Schoolcraft tapes [3] revealed how the department's unquestioning interpretation of data that, regardless of the validity of the foundational statistics, resulted in extremely unfair quotas, the kind of practices that make obvious the NYPD's unwitting collaboration with the black population to create a culture that is hostile towards police.

(And how is Officer Schoolcraft doing? He recently settled a lawsuit against the NYPD for committing him to a psych ward under false pretenses. [4])

But hell, let's think of the most accurate and simple-to-explain crime-detecting algorithm there is: red-light cameras and radar guns. I'll assume I don't need to provide citations for how this form of policing has been criticized over the years, or how the loudest critics aren't all just black folks, as it's pretty easy enough to find stories and documentation via Google.

[0] http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-city-rapes-gal...

[1] http://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-by-year/2013

[2] http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-lapd-audit-assaults-20...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/topic/subject/stop-and-frisk-policy-n...

[4] http://gothamist.com/2015/09/30/whistleblower_cop_adrian_sch...

> the generally agreed upon assumption that blacks make up a disproportionate number of suspects in criminal cases.

Do you use "assumption" here to mean "divorced from data"? Because I'm of the impression that is hardly contested in the field of criminology.

I didn't mean it as a derogatory term. I mean mostly that I assume that the data and methodology is sound (because it seems straightforward to calculate). But my main contention is not only if that data justifies targeting blacks disproportionately for stops and frisks, but whether that increased targeting can be implemented in a way that doesn't ultimately lead to a bad feedback situation and/or quotas that lead to arbitrary searching, as the Schoolcraft situation exposed.

And there's the question of whether or not it reduces crime, and if it does, does it at a rate that exceeds the rate of increased mistrust in society, the kind of mistrust that often fosters law breaking behavior.

Gotcha. Thanks for the clarification. :)

One could also argue: do black communities commit more crime or is it just enforced more in black communities due to more police presence, etc...

I'm not aware of any conclusive data that shows that black people are more predisposed to commit crime even if the outcome is higher crime rates in black communities.

There is clear and conclusive evidence that black people commit violent crime at a higher rate than white people in the United States [1]. Arguments that arrests are not representative of true crime are not based in sound statistical arguments, for crimes such as murder, there is no plausible argument that police are 6 times as likely to arrest a black criminal for murder than a white criminal. If anything police would investigate murders of white people more seriously as shown by the rate of unsolved murders by state [2], but the magnitude of this effect isn't enough to explain the discrepancy even if you assume that all unsolved murders are committed by white people, as only about 33% of murders go unsolved on average.

Given that crime is strongly correlated with poverty, and being black is also strongly correlated with poverty in the United States, it would be very surprising if black people did not commit more crime.

[1] http://www.amren.com/archives/reports/the-color-of-crime-201... [2] http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2013/01/rates-of-unsolved-murd...

Biased humans program systems, biased humans collect data, biased humans feed systems data, biased humans purchase systems that affirm their biases, biased humans point at the black boxes as a confirmation for their bias. How can a black box be wrong? After all, it is a computer and it is not influenced by bias like a human.

Would you rather have a biased human attempt to make data-driven, statistically based, decisions, or a biased human make decisions based on whatever they feel like? Either way there will be bias in the system. You don't have to be faster than the bear, you just have to faster than your friend.

I'm sure most people would not deny this mechanism exists. The distinction is whether one focuses on this mechanism (correct Bayesian inference) or the various biases and feedback loops described in the article. Personally I believe that progressives miss the forest for the trees: there is a huge gap between White and Black crime that encompasses almost every kind of crime[0]. While I am against any policy that exacerbates this gap, or otherwise discriminates against Black people, I feel that there is a huge effort by the progressive movement to promote an understanding of these subtleties, while at the same time actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime. For example, progressives like to point out that for drug charges this gap could be explained by uneven enforcement (though I don't know if this claim is accurate - the evidence is somewhat indirect) but fail to mention that for most other crimes this claim is not tenable.

And fyi, a very basic fact[1] in the field of criminology is that being black is predictive[2] of crime even after controlling for income and education. I'm not criticizing you for not knowing this since this fact is considered "racist" when expressed by non-experts, and experts only refer to it among themselves, in order to avoid the fact being misinterpreted.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

[1] It's not entirely uncontested, but it certainly represents the majority belief in most social science disciplines. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S....

[2] "predictive" is a term of art, meaning that it has a positive coefficient when used on the right hand side of a regression where "crime" is on the left hand side, along with other right hand side variables which depend on the context.

I can't speak for the progressives that you have read from, but I can say that there is strong movement on the conservative front for criminal justice reform. Here's a good op-ed by Doug Deason:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/30/opinion/ruining-lives-with...

His first anecdote gets at the issue to which I believe you misattribute to progressives, "actively repressing general knowledge of the basic facts about race and crime":

> I am a Republican businessman, and President Obama and I do not see eye to eye on most issues. But I agree with him on the inequities of the criminal justice system. I learned about it firsthand. Like many 17-year-olds, I did something stupid. It was 1979, and I threw a party at the home of neighbors while they were out of town. (Their son had given me a key.) The party got out of hand, ultimately getting the attention of the police. I was charged with felony burglary.

> My actions were wrong and irresponsible. They could also have ruined my life, affecting my ability to go to college or even get a job. But unlike many in my situation, I was able to fight the charge.

Perhaps the progressives you accuse of deliberately spreading ignorance, are indeed not focusing on the "basic facts". But they might argue that that focus is flawed in the first place. If blacks were disproportionately targeted and punished for low-level offenses, then that leads to a disproportionate number of people who have criminal records. Even if you ignore the material impact of incarceration, there's the issue of how criminal record can be a negative factor in job searches and overall participation and trust in society.

The basic fact that a greater proportion of blacks commit serious felonies is probably not considered a basic fact for folks who believe that blacks have also a greater proportion of being disenfranchised. It's probably more like a tautology.

Omitting the distinction between being a convicted criminal and being a criminal is what makes your statement racist, and non-factual.

We don't have any sure mechanism to determine the incidence of criminal activity in the general population. Most rigorous academic analysis I have seen shows no statistically significant difference in criminal activity between races. (Which is in contrast to convicted criminals.)

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