Predictive Policing

**davidbfpo** · 01-21-2018

A podcast (33 mns) via WNYC with:

Andrew Ferguson Professor of Law at the University of the District of Columbia's David A. Clarke School of Law, discusses his book The Rise of Big Data Policing: Surveillance, Race, and the Future of Law Enforcement. He examines big data and algorithm-driven policing and its impact on law enforcement. He also looks at how new technologies will alter the who, where, when and how we police, and why data-driven methods could actually improve police accountability.

Link:https://www.wnyc.org/story/data-driven-policing/

Part of his argument is that this approach has grown out of Compstat.

**davidbfpo** · 12-24-2018

I have heard hints about a large Home Office (central government) project worth £15m on 'big data' and it is actually run locally. So started a look around and found the project is National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS).

Last month there was this 'exclusive' and within an explanation by the police 'lead':

This the first such project of its kind in the world, pooling multiple data sets from a number of police forces for crime prediction, says Donnelly. In the early phases, the team gathered more than a terabyte of data from local and national police databases, including records of people being stopped and searched and logs of crimes committed. Around 5 million individuals were identifiable from the data. Looking at this data, the software found nearly 1400 indicators that could help predict crime, including around 30 that were particularly powerful. These included the number of crimes an individual had committed with the help of others and the number of crimes committed by people in that individual’s social group.
The machine learning component of NDAS will use these indicators to predict which individuals known to the police may be on a trajectory of violence similar to that observed in past cases, but who haven’t yet escalated their activity. Such people will be assigned a risk score indicating the likelihood of future offending.

Link:https://www.newscientist.com/article...re-it-happens/

**davidbfpo** · 01-23-2019

A short article and the sub-title is: A UK police force uses an algorithm to choose which crimes to investigate. It has led to half as many assaults and public order offences being pursued.

It ends with a salutary warning:

Police forces only ever know about crimes they detect or have reported to them, but plenty of crime goes unreported, especially in communities that have less trust in the police. This means the algorithms are making predictions based on a partial picture. While this sort of bias is hard to avoid, baking it into an algorithm may make its decisions harder to hold to account compared with an officer’s. John Phillips, superintendent at Kent Police, says that for the types of crimes that EBIT is being used for, under-reporting isn’t an issue and so shouldn’t affect the tool’s effectiveness.

Link:https://www.newscientist.com/article/2189986-a-uk-police-force-is-dropping-tricky-cases-on-advice-of-an-algorithm/?

**davidbfpo** · 02-05-2019

Predictive policing is getting rather than more media coverage in the UK, just why and now is unclear.

Much of the criticism concerns the use of AI in decision-making, even down to "hot spots" where police activity should concentrate. Ethics has also become an issue, with some ethicists now sitting on advisory groups and others "throwing stones from outside".

Today The Guardian has an editorial, sub-titled:

Machines can make human misjudgments very much worse. And should never be trusted with criminal justice

Link:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/04/the-guardian-view-on-and-algorithms-big-data-makes-bigger-problems?
This highlights the civil liberties group Liberty have just issued a critical report:https://www.libertyhumanrights.org.u...inatory-data-0

The BBC News had a short item yesterday and this referred to a critical local report which I had missed:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47118229 and https://www.turing.ac.uk/sites/defau...ort_to_wmp.pdf

**davidbfpo** · 02-27-2019

Two articles, the first I missed is quite lengthy and very critical.
Link:https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...icing-software

The second makes available the FOI documents gathered for the first article.
Link:https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ing-in-america