Justice in the Age of Big Data
The way the chapter starts off is very important! It starts off by telling the story of Reading, Pennsylvania. Reading was going through budget cuts since its economy wasn’t doing so good. Highest poverty rate in the country, the point is that because of low income, cuts were made to the police department of Reading. Crime was still high but the police force had to be shrunk. This made Chief William Heim implement PredPol. All of this was implemented because of low budget, a cheaper “more efficient” way of Policing. This program processes historical crime data and calculated where crime was to happen. The program would pinpoint to two football fields worth of squares where the remaining patrolmen, that were not cut, would spend most of their time. It draws similarities to the shifting defensive models in baseball. This is the issue with PredPol, they have to parts, part 1 is violent crimes, homocide, arson, assault but part 2 has crimes including vagrancy, aggresive panhandling, and selling and consuming small quantities of drugs. Part 2 are low petty crimes. Things that cops, without use of the system, would let people off with a warning. Many of these low offenses result in impoverished neighborhoods, most are latino or black neighborhoods. So are the algorithms really trying to stop violent offenses? Serious crime? Nope, that’s not a100% their mission. Seems easy for them to say, “I’ll get my quota for the month of tickets I have to hand out if i go to this hot spot” The Predpol software should be optimized into only caring about serious crimes, about cleaning up serious offenses instead of policing low level offense. Biggest take away is how software, once again, is categorizing people based on parameters and messing up people’s lives. Why is it that a computer program decides people’s futures? Having a criminal record EFFECTS A LOT. Just having that record can ban you from plenty of jobs. I know people with records and it not only effects what they are available for, it effects their mind set on who they are as a person when only certain jobs are available, even if they are trying to make a real change.
