Rise of the new police state: Predictive Policing in effect!

By: Dr. Samori Swygert

We are at the dawn of a new era in law enforcement. There is an expansive and proliferating trend that grants unprecedented authorities and capabilities to our police. This year we’ve witnessed the supreme court ruling, that authorizes cops to take and warehouse the DNA of individuals that have been arrested (more so for “serious crimes”) in a database.

We’ve seen the re-implementation of STOP and FRISK policing on the public. We’ve seen the New York State Senate pass a bill that Okays the arrest of a citizen that annoys, and even harasses a cop, with a punishment of up to 4 years in jail and a felony conviction on their criminal record.

I posted an article that discussed how a new gunshot recognition system records the video, photo, biometric facial scan, and audio of individuals once a shot is fired in the city. We’ve seen the use of license plate scanners mounted on police patrol cars to identify the status of the car, and identify the respected driver.

Police departments across the country have now added a new tool in their crime fighting efforts. This is called PREDICTIVE POLICING, and the company developing the program is known as PredPol. This system is currently in use in California, Washington, South Carolina, Arizona, Tennessee, Illinois, and even the United Kingdom.

The system is data driven, and uses the information from prior crimes, and current crimes. The company has specific modeling algorithms that compiles: date, time, type of crime, geographic location and other data parameters. Statistical analysis allows the system to generate the probability of a certain type of crime in a specific location and time. These locations and time stamps are referred to as HOTSPOTS. The hotspots are then marked on maps of the city for police to patrol and do reconnaissance work if they are not involved in an active pursuit.

Many police departments like the system because it grants a virtual or real time circumstance where they can exercise proactive interventions of criminal activity. The software is accessible on their cellphones and laptops. Pete Cribbin, Assistant Chief of Tacoma, Washington Police Department, was quoted as saying “we have had several successes of catching the offender ‘red-handed’ and making arrests.” The police departments like the PredPol system also because it conserves monetary resources. They’ve not had to hire more officers and waste time on general patrols, because they have hotspots and projected potential crime scenes based on data analytics.

My Thoughts

This seems a bit like the movie Minority Report to me, where you are almost anticipating and forecasting behavior. I understand data driven software models, but this seems a bit much! The articles I read said that the developer did not design this to profile individuals. However, I have numerous questions. Who inputs the data? How do you remove or compensate for bias or prejudice of the data user? Won’t you eventually develop a profile if you implement this in Hotspot? For instance, if you set this up in a highly populated African American community that is plagued with unemployment, drugs, and crime, won’t you eventually say that police should look for a black male, on this date and time,. And find someone that fits the description a computer generated? They just have to add race to their parameter (I’m sure they have, but just haven’t disclosed it in the articles I’ve read), and you will have a racially based system of patrol. This can turn unwitting innocent citizens into potential suspects by just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This really makes me believe that this is tied to a guaranteed 90% occupancy of private prisons. The police departments and states can furnish this data, and crime statistics to bolster their support for the construction of more private prisons. When you can predict, forecast, anticipate, and project crimes that have yet to crystallize, you are walking on thin ice. The system can generate the hotspot, but when the officer arrives and encounters a potential suspect, the imperfect human factor gets introduced into the equation, and that’s the wild card! Thus, we must also factor in several components such as: police and community relations, race relations, financial incentives, influence of elicit and illegal drugs or alcohol in the patrolmen, dirty cops, quotas, and the psychological state/condition of the officer on duty. We can find ourselves in a situation where officers are trying to make arrests to fit the data generated by the system, or “make the ends justify the means”! This can result in thousands of Trayvon Martins, Sean Bells, and Amadou Diallos (innocent men targeted).

There are also things that the system can’t account for such as: people’s morals, values, ethics, religious principles, moments of clarity, character, and standards that may abort an individual’s involvement in a crime.

So in closing, we have STOP and FRISK, DNA extraction, Felony for harassment, Real Time gunshot audio, video, photo, and facial scan technology, license plate scanners, the NDAA, and now predictive policing under our law enforcement umbrella. This seems like the rise of the new state of the art American Police State to me. The strategies above seem to provide safety benefits, but they also have a duality of potential perversion and abuse of authority that was unaccounted for and not calculated into the system. We should definitely keep an eye on this, and query our local police departments and city council if they plan on implementing this. Okay be blessed!!! Next article………..TATTOO DATABASES

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Rise of the new police state: Predictive Policing in effect!

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