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Tactically Inept

Threat score.


kuhla

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source - https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/the-new-way-police-are-surveilling-you-calculating-your-threat-score/2016/01/10/e42bccac-8e15-11e5-baf4-bdf37355da0c_story.html

 

 

FRESNO, Calif. — While officers raced to a recent 911 call about a man threatening his ex-girlfriend, a police operator in headquarters consulted software that scored the suspect’s potential for violence the way a bank might run a credit report.

The program scoured billions of data points, including arrest reports, property records, commercial databases, deep Web searches and the man’s social- media postings. It calculated his threat level as the highest of three color-coded scores: a bright red warning.

The man had a firearm conviction and gang associations, so out of caution police called a negotiator. The suspect surrendered, and police said the intelligence helped them make the right call — it turned out he had a gun.
....

 

My initial reaction is just that I find it funny. Like a videogame scoreboard. On the one hand I'm a fan of the "data driven policing" (I know that's a broad term) since there are some statistics related to crime that do trend pretty well (heatmaps, recidivism, etc.). On the other hand, web searches and social media posting is some pre-crime sillyness.

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I would imagine their system does a decent job when people are "in the system" and have arrests/convictions on their records. I would imagine this system does a poor job of dealing with people who haven't been in the system or have no criminal records. If that's how threat scores are used and utilized I wouldn't mind too much, but once you start scouring someone's social media or using someone's all caps twitter posting as a basis for criminal score, then we have a problem.

 

I also know that various police agencies have been using data to determine which areas should be patrolled with more frequency and how best to handle distributing police manpower.

On the flip side they've also been using license plate scanners and scooping up information that I don't feel very comfortable with. Ideally all of these processes need to have some level of oversight (preferably by an elected official) to cut down on some of the possible abuses.

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The short answer is, probably 10-20 years. I think the real struggle many agencies are now running into isn't data collection but analysis. You can look at the Paris attacks as an example, the communication wasn't encrypted and the perpetrators were on watch lists. It wasn't a matter of the data being unavailable, it was a matter of the data being analyzed and put into something actionable.

 

Right now with smartphones tracking people's position in relative real time, with cars license plates being scanned for another means to track people's movements it's easy to digitally track people and place them in or around crime scenes. You also have multiple government agencies keeping criminal records, credit records, job applications, and communications records of most people. It's not a matter of collecting more data so much as it is sifting through the data and making it usable. Once various agencies figure out that part, we'll start seeing much more preventative measures taking place.

 

I don't ever think we'll have thought crime and people being arrested before they even commit anything, but I do think we'll have people we deem "higher threat level" under more stringent monitoring possibly even monitored by humans rather than just an algorithm.

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Completely serious here, how long until minority report becomes a reality?

 

The whole premise of minority report is setup by the precogs who can literally see the future. I don't want to drag a science fiction fantasy novel into this just because popular culture has adopted "precrime" into their nomenclature.

 

As far as how long until people who are being monitored but have committed no crime are being restricted? The lite version is already here: No-Fly List.

 

Like malaphax said though, a bit limitation of the current systems is processing of the data. From the outside it seems like a person(s) has to take special interest in you for whatever reason for your information to actually be sifted through otherwise it just goes in the stack. I imagine someone somewhere is trying to develop queries or algorithems to try and process all those logs, analyze trends or watch for historical deviations, and then output the more useful information to human operators. In many ways that summarizes a lot of what I have been doing lately at my job. Unless someone does this, the information goes unnoticed and un-acted-upon.

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I'm not trying to draw parallels between Sci fi and big data as literally being the same. but can at a certain point the data becomes so conclusive and the probability so high that if an individual is "statistically guaranteed" to commit crime 'x' before they commit it, what happens? And if you talk about restricting civil liberties, where is the line?

 

As data analysts become better and better the chance of error becomes smaller and smaller- how soon until the difference between data analysis and precognition is nonexistent?

 

I think that's the comparison with Sci fi that might be relevant. It obviously won't apply on the same scale but look at statistics for reoffenders. I can imagine this kind of data would be a large factor for parole hearings and the like.

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Recidivism quickly turns into a whole topic itself because you have to start asking if recidivism occurs at the rates that it does because of a justice system that permanently punishes people. However in it's current form, yes, the trending data is hard to ignore. It should not be ignored.

 

Eventually I think it comes down to having to make a judgement call.

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I think it's far more likely we'll see the ability for data to track crimes that would in the past have gone unsolved. One example is that since tracking people's location is quite easy now, you can use that to pinpoint who was in the area of a crime that was committed. If graffiti suddenly appeared on a freeway overpass one day, the police might be able to get a subpoena to track down anyone who was in that area for extended periods of time the previous evening. That would be a plausible and somewhat reasonable way to use large amounts of data to help provide leads and help cut down on certain crime.

 

On the side of creating threat scores or predictive data, I think it becomes dangerous to rely too heavily upon both machines and people when it comes to prejudice. The algorithm might suggest that since an individual has served time in prison for violent offenses he may be more prone to violence, even a human being with access to the information might be able to make that same judgement. The issue becomes how do the police officers act upon that information, they might even become too heavily biased by the data and focus on the obvious suspect with a past criminal record instead of a different perpetrator. Additionally no system is perfect, even if we all wore monitors that observed our behavior at all times I sincerely doubt our current level of machine intelligence (if you can even call it that) would be capable of making decisions that would be accurate 100% of the time, let alone have the capacity to "predict" our future actions.

 

I do think that people which are considered "high risk" will invariably be monitored more carefully than the average person. You could look at how quickly parole technology has progressed, ankle monitors are rather common now for house arrest cases and act as a reasonable deterrent, whereas only a few years ago house arrest might not have been as stringent or as effective as today.

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