- Hanging around in public
- Being a victim of personal crime
- Coming from broken homes
Page 72 show that they use records of children who experience physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, or witness domestic violence to put them on lists. Page 73 shows the "At-Risk Youth Spreadsheet" which is both terrifying and strikingly banal.
For example, we have known that broken homes lead to all sorts of problems a much greater proportion of the time for ages. And one of the things that becomes more likely is crime.
Not that that makes a computer algorithm’s predictions true. Just saying that it’s not terrifying to point out that there really are such things that increase risk that we are well aware of.
> The Sheriff’s Office says its program is based on research. It points to a 2015 study that found young people who had experienced multiple childhood traumas were at a higher risk of becoming serious, violent criminals than those who hadn’t.
> But David Kennedy, a renowned criminologist and professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice whose research is referenced in Pasco’s manual, said the associations between childhood trauma and criminal behavior are “extremely weak.” He said using them to make predictions about individuals “flies in the face of the science.”
> The methodology used by the Sheriff’s Office, he added, was likely to generate a large pool of children, the vast majority of whom would never get in serious trouble.
> “There’s nothing — absolutely nothing — that can be fed into even the most sophisticated algorithm or risk-assessment tool based on information available when someone is a child that can say this person is going to be a criminal later on, much less a serious prolific criminal,” he said.
[1] https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/p...
When being harassed by police is itself sufficient to turn a person into a criminal, or ruin their life, you end up in a situation where everyone is doing what is 'reasonable', but leading to outcomes that are both unfair, and even negative overall, to society.
I agree. I just think that when critics read articles like the one in this post, they might walk away with the idea that all of these assumptions are fine and that critics of these systems are being alarmist. They might see these metrics as reasonable considering they reflect trends in actual criminals, but not understand that they are being used to predict criminal behavior, which like you mentioned with the two almost definitely innocent people is not the same thing.
If you think China's social credit system isn't terrifying, then I guess I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't find this terrifying.