I recall WWII being (at least in part) a war against those who ignored human rights in the name of efficiency.
Also, this isn’t a database of criminals. This is a database of citizens. Amazingly, the police are not supposed to treat you as a potential criminal. There needs to be a crime first. Assuming that someone can be responsible for something that hasn’t happened is fantasy land magical thinking, and not the stuff of science or responsible public policy.
Peer review can be conducted secretly. There’s no reason to believe this measure is not based on peer reviewed research.
No. It isn’t. Have you ever had them show up for no reason?
There are fewer reasons to believe it is. Citation for your assertion please.
Since abuse during childhood is a major predictor for future problems, I assume this means the CPD is having little chats with the PARENTS and other guardians of the at-risk youths…right?
And how many Catholic priests have they interviewed?
These are all moral/legal objections, and have nothing to do with science. Science will happily tell you that a Jew is more likely to be opposed to the Nazi state than a good Aryan. Science does not become pseudoscience just because you dislike the conclusions, or the people carrying it out, or its goals.
If that is their reasoning for not revealing how they choose pre-crime suspects, then it is demonstrative of one (of many) of their misunderstandings.
They claim to be plumbing the depths of social media for data, & think that depth can be manipulated by the subjects that they claim to be able to find?
And pseudo science does not become science just because you compare it to noble causes from the past while using double negatives. I consider our discussion closed.
Yeah, that’s by my reading exactly right. I don’t see what the methodological problem is here.
The fact something has a scientific basis isn’t an argument for its use. Guns have a scientific basis, but clearly aren’t an appropriate tool for every law enforcement problem.
Let’s pretend this precrime “tool” actually worked and identified people who would commit crimes. The minute they step in and make a visit they are messing up the “experiment.” In the best case scenario their interventions work and would seem to invalidate the tool; in the neutral scenario the visits don’t work and the tool is really only good making budgetary forecasts about how much jail space and emergency services budget you will need; in the worst case scenario the visits actually aggravate people, making them lash out or feel destined to commit crime so more people commit crime than would have had they not been visited at all.
But the biggest mistake here is treating crime as though it were a disease or a genetic trait, and not what it is - a social construct, subject to the whims and manipulations of humans and the laws they create.
There are many people in Canada who get on a treadmill of bail breaches. As a court reporter I’ve seen people get acquitted of the initial offence they were picked up for, but then have to plead guilty to breaching the conditions of their bail - drinking when ordered not to, being out after curfew. Now they are criminals, even though the court decided they weren’t ever actually guilty of the original offence. Can’t say for certain in the U.S. but in Canada, the more educated and better off you are, the lighter your sentence and the more likely you are to be able to ask for a discharge or a conditional discharge. In Ontario we had a so-called actuarial tool called ODARA. It’s supposed to predict the likelihood of a person charged with a spousal assault re-offending while out on bail against their alleged victim. The developer of the tool said under oath that some of the data included in the tool were incidents in which authorities were certain the accused person had committed an assault, but no conviction had been registered. I don’t dispute it’s entirely possible for a guilty person to be acquitted. But it’s also entirely possible for police to believe someone is guilty and for them to be wrong. In Canada we’ve had many many examples of wrongful convictions.
If I imagine the best possible use of this tool it’s not for police visits of the sort described, but used instead to put social workers and social safety net funding and education funding into the neighbourhoods that need it most.
That’s how you’re going to help the kid, by telling his teachers he’s probably going to become a criminal?
And then when somebody steals something from the classroom, who do you think the teacher is going to suspect?
And when it comes time to decide who gets into honors classes, do you think the ‘future criminal’ is going to get selected if his grades are on the border?
And even if you trust teachers to never prejudge their students, what about the student himself? It’s not “crime is something you should never do”, it’s “crime is something people like you do”. How is that a remotely good way of teaching the child to be a positive member of society?
This isn’t about the children. This is about fear, and making sure the powerful aren’t the ones feeling it.
The justification is fear of , and the solution is do something that should make more afraid. Just like any other bullying tactic.
It’s not about science. This is social engineering.
Listen. Get this across your head. Science has nothing to do with nobility. If the only difference you identify between this and the examples I gave is the nobility of the cause and the fact that there was a war on, then you have no argument.
The folly of the ‘pseudoscience’ accusation is that you are attacking this policy for being INEFFECTIVE, when you actually want to attack the policy for being IMMORAL. Keep at the argument about effectiveness, and they will find a way to make it more effective, and then you’d be shit out of luck.
Assume a competent enemy until proven otherwise. Assume they did use good peer reviewed research because that is a bigger threat to public liberty than otherwise.
Science also has nothing to do with demeaning people you disagree with.
Here is a primer on the development of atomic weapons, which you brought into the conversation
If you could try not to spin the conversation away from the parts where there was cross-atlantic sharing of ideas pre-war, in the name of science (discovery for the sake of discovery) and that the engineering of the bomb (discovery for the sake of practicality) was done in a WAR mentality, and that we are discussing civillian policing actions, which are very much NOT the same as wartime intelligence actions. This is not war. This is main street.
If you would like to show where and when peer review of this database program HAS OCCURRED, then do so. Anything else is just your opinion.
No.
One of the means whereby they claim that it is just & moral is by a methodology they won’t reveal. Demands that it be revealed is working toward an attack on it being both ineffective & immoral.
So long as they continue to claim that it is science, but trust us, fools will assume it is science for being told so. That plays to the justification, which plays to the morality, which is built on what?
Eugenics got a lot of play for being “science”, now it is classed as a social philosophy that was propped up initially by science later proved faulty & full of assumptions.
You want people should not demand to know what now? Saying it isn’t science until you can show it is is perfectly legitimate.
I don’t see how that works out that way. Assuming they did things properly without requiring them to demonstrate is giving up on the need for transparency, when one of the many issues here is that we should be insisting on it. If there’s a point to making such a concession, it isn’t obvious to me.
It’s more important that this policy is immoral than ineffective, but since there are also people who care more about the latter than the former, I ask again: why not both?
Woooooosh!!
Dude, you are trolling. You may not know it, but you are.
(Hint, you are answering for somebody else and your counterpoint is something for which I didn’t raise an issue (Though I could, especially the part about facts, but I didn’t because it makes no difference to the argument the way its set up. (Unless the point was astroturfing, but its rendered moot if the premises aren’t backed up with anything more than hearsay. (Unless you cherry pick a post, then you can believe anything))))
Maybe parenthesis wasn’t the way to go there, but no way am I unpacking that now 
Performing a scientific evaluation does not make what you are studying science. I would be willing to bet that a scientific evaluation of police hunches would show that in general hunches are more correct than rolling dice. But that doesn’t make hunches scientific.
And there is no good reason for this algorithm to be secret when the stated goal is to get adversaries to respond to it.
“If you automatically assume the cops PEOPLE are guilty of every possible infraction then the people you hope to convince will simply tune you out.”
FTFY
As a Chicagoan with friends on the CPD who work these beats, i must say, you are an idiot.
Take a stroll in Englewood sometime, please.
You have no idea.
