Indeed, sending a police patrol will only catch the kind of crime that happens in socio-economically disadvantaged communities, which in turn contributes to skewing the data to suggest that more crimes there, which leads to more policing, which leads to more crime, and so on.
Meanwhile, wage theft, over twice the size of all other kinds of theft put together, keeps growing year after year.
Police patrols should be entirely reactive, and not proactive. Proactive policing does not work.
Predicting where you will need to send patrols is proactive policing.
This has been known in those communities for decades. It's only the most obvious, well-documented brutality that has begun to make other people aware of it. It's the broad reaction to that brutality, where other police and their strongest supporters reflexively excuse the inexcusable, that have made people like these mathematicians realize that sending the police doesn't solve the problems that their models are pinpointing.
If the mathematicians want to help people, they'll model the broader causes of poverty, injustice, and inequality. Then we can try to solve the real problems, rather than "I heard there was a problem, let's send in people with guns until it gets better."
Policing is not causing crime. People committing crime is causing crime.
The vast majority of crime where police should be involved are crimes where the victim can call the police later. For those that don't fit this criteria, either police patrols are already ineffective (targeted assassinations, for example), or the police isn't being called because the victim thinks it will make the situation worse. Which in many cases is true, and I think fixing that problem would be a good step to take.
Respecting the victim's wishes is basically giving tacic approval of spousal abuse and honor killings.
This sort of prediction depends on the data being good. That's not a given. Even the crime statistics are problematic. There is an issue with certain groups getting treated differently in arrests and convictions.
So you could have an area that doesn't have much crime reported because when crime happens it's not reported as crime. Whereas you can have other areas that have a lot more crime reported because there is less leniency given to the population.
I think what the article says is likely to be true. It's a scientific cover-your-ass label for the high-ups to be able to do whatever they want and justify it. Similar to how CEOs bring in external consultants and pay them fat money so the CEOs can now do whatever they wanted originally, but now with Big Consulting Firm's stamp of approval. You can make these "AI" models skew to the direction you want. Just as it is with statistics and p-hacking, only that the machine learning community is even less versed in confidence values and is just generally less mature in terms of best practices as it's a newer field.
And absolutely researchers should pay attention to who they work for and where the money comes from. Fundamental research is one thing, working on general AI is useful for all human endeavors just like working on energy efficiency or better cars. It's a necessary part of life that bad actors have benefits from a tide raising all ships.
But it's not the same when directly working on a project for a bad actor. Similar to how Google engineers stood up against military projects or serving the Chinese censoring machine, it is important for mathematicians and computer scientists to consider whether they are building something unethical. These are professionals, intellectuals who have more responsibility than lower paid workers. We cannot blame the cleaning personnel or the cooks at the police canteen in the same way.
It is part of one's civic duty as an intellectual to reflect upon one's societal role and impact.
Again, this is not about fundamental research, that might be used for evil purposes. It's about directly working for corrupt organizations. Whether the police in general (or which specific levels or branches) is corrupt enough to refuse working for them and how much worse they are compared to big corporations is hard for me to judge from Europe. But it's certainly something that people working for them should reflect on and make a moral choice because they are the ones who see what they actually work on. There are many places for mathematicians and computer scientists to work at and so they have the luxury to follow their conscience. And all this also applies to intelligence agencies, like the NSA and others as well.
I assure you mathematicians aren't optimizing the "visbile presence in the community". That's not something you need a mathematician for. Mathematicians are optimizing the ability of police to maximize the number of arrests by deciding which areas they should patrol in order to maximize crime.
You have to ask yourself why there is more crime in poor areas. The answer is that we don't go looking for or don't care about the crime that happens in other areas as much, and that the socio-economic conditions lead to more crime. You can't fix these issues by sending police there to act like an occupying army. You can only fix the root cause.
As a personal anecdote, having grown up in such places, people have so many bad experiences with police that they genuinely don't want to call them when their presence might maybe help. So is sending police patrols to maximize the number of arrests and create ever more negative experiences the solution? No. You have to fix the root cause.
How, is this your line of work?
Not that predicting where crimes will occur is really a thing - more likely you are just predicting where a population is getting policed.
Removing criminal elements from communities creates safer communities, which is a prerequisite for people thriving.
I'm not sure it's a good idea to assume certain truths based upon intuition.
That is not what occurred in practice and there is no data to suggest this would ever be a probable outcome. At any rate people don’t have a choice on who responds if the call is to 911.
I challenge your assumption. To me it seems intuitive that crimes are committed at higher rates by the socioeconomically advantaged, because they can get away with it.
See for example that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the general population.
https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing...
Completely agree on proactive policing. End the drug war and it would cease to be necessary.
It is fiction, so it isn't a history book and there are plenty of assumptions on how things will work. However, in good fiction, those assumptions are plausible and highlight a future that may happen.
Dismissing fiction is just like having a stock manager that dismisses quarterly reports since they don't definitively tell you how the company will be doing - they just tell you how it has been doing. Prediction and imagination are not flawless tools, but they are helpful to plan for the future. (Which is amusing to say in the light of the book being discussed)
The data behind 911 Good Samaritan laws[1] that protect people from being arrested when they call in overdoses would like to have a word with you.
[1] https://www.shatterproof.org/advocacy/state-by-state-informa...
If I similarly just made up a book where police surveillance was the best thing in the world would you cite that as an argument in favour?
How can you use a made up story to argue something when someone else could make up another story that disproves your point and proves theirs?
Just by chance, you can go back and find stories from the past that seem prophetic now, but not going forward.
PredPol is a precrime system written by a mathematician (an assistant professor of math and CS) which recommends where police officers ought to patrol. [2] PredPol was deployed in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles, CA.
This is not fiction.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20100603031047/http://www.dhs.go...
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2011/110527/full/news.2011.323.h...
No the book and movie are fiction, I mean. You can't learn anything from them. They're made up. Inside someone's head. There's zero data points in them.
I'm sure you can learn something from studying the history of the two projects you mentioned!
But not from a story someone made up and that some people acted out on a film set. That's not data. Don't base you philosophy on something that didn't actually happen.
You have made the erroneous assumption that I cannot articulate the insights, and further the erroneous conflation between "cannot" and "will not".
Using the logic you've already employed, one could conclude that the entire anthology of philosophical texts also have zero bearing on reality because "they're all made up".
The details are total BS, but sci-fi is absolutely a good vector for allegories and societal insights.
In any case, if you are giving anyone defibrillators and locating them to minimize response time to cardiac incidents, it would be absurd to give it to the police.
If you're actually trying to contribute to the discussion, it follows that you would try to convey the insights you've learned from Minority Report in a way that can help others to appreciate what you think is important.
You're right -- it could very well be that you have some deep insight you gained from Minority Report, but simply refuse to say it, even as you post on this forum, and even as you demand others take the time to watch it based on nothing but that demand. I was aware of this possibility, but ignored it, because that would speak very poorly of you, to take the time to post and yet share nothing of what you learned.
What's more likely is that you have nothing to share, because you simply had the feeling of insight, but without any of the substance that would allow you to share what you've learned. The fact that you so steadfastly refuse to share means you probably never gained the insight to begin with. That's why I made the comment: to distinguish between false and real insight, you need to do a check about whether you can actually share with others what you learned without them having to set aside the three hours that you did.
That's not snark, it's good epistemic hygiene and respect for others' time in a discussion. I do hope you take the advice seriously next time.
Deterrence and deescalation are where predictive policing could theoretically be useful but in practice it is often just bias laundering or reinforcing their tautologies. Looking at the "wrong side of the tracks" more and the arrest rates will climb there even if crime is actually lower there - let alone confounding variables. Like say the police being called in domestic disputes by witnesses in thin walled apartments and trailer parks but not in large fenced estates even if they are just as loud and violent because they weren't literally heard.
Societal and philosophical questions don't work like that, ethics are driven by society and the view of society changes over time with actions like, as an example, eating beef on Fridays being incredibly taboo among christian societies a few hundred years ago (and to this day in some areas) to the point where taking an action like that in public would likely call into question your ability to act ethically.
Ethics is a highly subjective field - if you try and revive geocentric solar system models with a paper that essentially amounts to "I said so" you'll be dismissed since there are theories with more evidence out there. The process of allegorization though is a more subjective and iterative process where two people can honestly state very different theories and have wide support from large groups - including potentially having mutual supporters.
The allegory that comes from Sci-fi isn't a statement of fact, it's an opinion on danger and while objective evidence is always preferred it doesn't mean that subjective evidence is meaningless. The process of going back and forth forever is quite valuable, if it isn't being done with "No, you're stupids" then each participant will be further developing their theory to account for weaknesses or vagaries exposed by the other participant and that process produces a better understanding in both parties and more refined theories to be presented to spectators.
The question of whether it's morally correct to commit murder is still open - there are some really compelling arguments in favor of not murdering people and some of those even arise purely out of self-interest[1] but if I say "Bob murdered Jim" there are all sorts of qualifiers and conditions that can take that from being pretty ethically repugnant (say infanticide) to being generally seen as justified (maybe, ongoing debate yo) at least in the US (say a genuinely necessary and unavoidable act of self-defense).
The problems fantasy is really good at digging into are ethical ones and, physics based fantasy books are super boring. If your sci-fi book was about how the earth would be different if G was actually 1.367×10−10 m3⋅kg−1⋅s−2 you would essentially have a book about how some mechanics of movement are affects and why planes are so expensive to fly - you could build an interesting plot, but the allegorical value would be essentially nil... well that's what I think, lesse is some sci-fi writer comes along and writes a super impactful and interesting novel about an earth that is essentially the same as ours but with slightly less than two times as much gravity.
1. Which tends to be the strongest moral guidance IMO, but I'm jaded :shrug: