Computers are predicting crimes for cops. What's next?
A small story popped up in the news this November
-- "A unique collaboration between a University of California,
Riverside sociologist and the Indio Police Department has produced a
computer model that predicts, by census block group, where burglaries
are likely to occur. ... The result is an 8 percent decline in thefts in
the first nine months of 2013." The Indio police chief called the
project the "wave of the future."
And by all appearances, it does appear to be on the menu for Federal law
enforcement. The National Security Agency and its digital dragnets
like PRISM --
one of the big Snowden leaks -- aren't just about immediate
surveillance of criminal activity. That's only a limited use of the
potential of a technology that creates profiles of a population, records
all their significant behavior,
communications and who their friends
are. A recent report from the FBI's Behavioral Threat Assessment Center (BTAC) on
pre-planned massacres like the one at Virginia Tech discusses the
benefits of "assessments of the risk of future violence while enabling
the development and implementation of dynamic enabling the development
and implementation of dynamic behavioral strategies to disrupt planned
attacks." In other words, stopping pre-crime.
Read on...
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Showing posts with label pre-crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pre-crime. Show all posts
Preemptive Arrest
A year after St. Paul police rounded up and arrested over 200 people who were planning to protest the Republican National Convention - but hadn't actually done anything yet - 27 plaintiffs filed a class action suit against the city on behalf of all those arrested. Police officers used pepper spray, non-lethal ammunition and horses against the protesters, none of whom was convicted of anything except not liking Republicans.
I remember watching Minority Report when it came out in 2002. It was topical. The U.S. was already well into justifying preemptive war, so it wasn't much of a stretch to imagine preemptive arrest. And of course it happened. I wonder how many peace protesters will get arrested this fall during anti-war demonstrations. Preemptively or not. Tom
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