The thing about it is that victims of abuse probably are more likely to commit abuse later in life. There is good reason to want to have a proactive response to this to try to avert the cycle of abuse.
The police are not the right tool for the job. They are hardly ever the right tool for the job.
If a county were saying, we are sending out extra welfare workers and social workers to parts of the community where AI is letting us know that they can be of extra benefit, I don’t know that I’d have a problem with the retrospective surveillance. If they were saying, we are trying to find the kids who are most likely to drop out of high school based on their grades and their living locations and we are going to pay them to continue attending school and getting passing grades, I would think that a positive.
On the other hand, a policy of “we think you might turn out to be a criminal so we are going to start treating you like a criminal” seems like its only goal is to have self-fulfilling prophesy, to reinforce the cycles of abuse and incarceration.
Defund the police.
Fund social workers.
