New technology, seen here, is allowing police precincts to use computers in order to predict, where and when crime will occur in certain neighborhoods. The Santa Cruz police department recently invested in software that uses a complicated algorithm that has all the data of crime from the last eight years. This technology is able to pinpoint crime hotspots, since it also takes into account the time of year, the time of day and even the weather. The program was created by a mathematician and an anthropologist (not a criminologist interestingly) and based it on earthquake shock waves. According to the article “A specific crime is broken down to the two most likely chunks of time it will probably occur, say noon to 1 p.m. or 4 to 5 p.m., so if an officer is working during that time, he or she knows to check that area” . This new piece of equipment may be very helpful for precincts that are strapped for cash and lacking policing staff. Apparently, the crime tracking data seems to be working and the algorithm has already correctly predicted 40 percent of crimes and had led to five arrests. Furthermore, Police said burglaries were down 27 percent in July compared to the same month last year. The technology also has led to officers questioning people merely for being in a hot spot. While I think this is a good idea, it definitely seems to have its flaws. No technology can truly predict what a person is going to do. I also would question if these statistics were manipulated to justify the cost of inputting the system.
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This is actually very interesting. With this system i will feel unsecured because i am letting a computer figure out when and how a crime is going to occur. This is definitely cost effective for cities who are cutting there budget but it should work as a reinforcement to the police force, and not as a crime guesser. Crimes do occur in patterns most times, but not all the time. It has solve 40% of crimes and led to 5 arrests, which is great for a computer, but how reliable is this machine? I think a computer cannot predict what someone is thinking, and especially now, that there is a syndrome for everything that you do, it will be very inaccurate.
By: Armenis Perez
Even before reading the Village Voice’s articles on Adrien Schoolcraft and his tapes regarding the problems within the police departments, I would have been highly skeptical of this new crime-predicting system. First of all, while criminals may be rational, they, like every other human are unpredictable. While we may exhibit predictable behavior in predictable situations, there is no telling what a person may do in an unpredictable situation. This whole system just seems incredibly ridiculous. To me it seems like this is just a desperate attempt by police officers in Santa Cruz to deal with the cutbacks. The claims regarding the lowering of crime seems eerily similar to those of the NYPD, which turned out to be completely false. I think that technology like this could in fact increase racial profiling, for example if there was a group of minorities in a “hot spot” at a predicted time they would most likely be harassed and brought in for questioning, and even potentially charged with a crime just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This technology is also eerily similar to the type of predictions that were made by Lombroso and other early criminologists about the type of people who were prone to committing crimes and being recidivist offenders. Overall, I think this “crime prediction system” is a bad idea. Especially when expanded to even larger cities like Los Angeles, where there are even more racial and socio-economic tensions than in Santa Cruz.
Well after being enlightened on the use of statistics and the problems associated with it (thanks to Prof. McKinney) and the articles on the police tapes. Throw in a little of Foucalt and his conceptions on the discourse of power, and you get a very cynical view of what this means in the general scheme of things. Without delving deeply into the slippery slope argument and the problems of “predictions” and preventative law enforcement, one is still wary of what these answers may say. It may positively reinforce the notions already held within society, continuing the legacy of an older system based on racial social and economic discrimination. Another problem is that the system may create a bigger social problem if it reinforces itself by magnifying certain crimes, and creating a blindfold on other types. And the article does not help to explain what are some of the costs of maintaining this sort of system, and in a way how that maintains its effectiveness. And since structures tend to reinforce and perpetuate itself as you have said in your blog post, how can we quantify its positive and negative effects. And also if we look at the statistical problems of crime reports, even though the system accurately predicted 40 percent of the crimes, we can argue that its also not as useful as we may like to think. It seems that we may be to far from the God-like crime prevention system we saw Tom Cruise use in Minority Report.