How can you determine whether you’ve prevented a crime? Suppose you and I are having a few drinks, and you predict that I’m going to puke? So you take my liquor away, and I don’t puke. Did you prevent it happening, or am I unreasonably tolerant toward alcohol?
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Totally disagree. It’s absurd to think that kids from marginalized groups are going to have the academic/social/technical support necessary to backwards engineer what must certainly be a highly complex formula, and then change their behavior in order to game the algorithm.
To put it another way, if Google were to suddenly release it’s Pagerank algorithm to the world, I sincerely doubt that anyone other than mathematicians or researchers with deep knowledgebases would be able to understand it or divine exactly how it works.
In addition, you’re mixing analogies here: Pagerank is a corporate-owned enterprise intended to make money for Google, whereas the CPD’s RobotJohnnyLaw is intended to protect and serve (or so they might say). Apples to oranges.
Finally, is it possible that this:
is a freudian slip? Chicago residents being targeted by such an algorithm are not adversaries–they’re citizens with rights against this sort of thing.
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I’m not a Chicagoan (but I’ve visited and it’s my favorite big city) what’s the chance that the CPD will also be using this on Chicago’s Wall Street types whose crimes (most often financial) tend to impact a large swath of the public?
Please don’t think that I’m relegating violent crime to a secondary status, but I’d bet that the day CPD shows up on Billy Bankster’s front door to tell them that they’ve been marked for pre-crime, there’s going to be a lot of sputtering about rights and lawyers and you-can’t-do-this.
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