Is this the full list of US cities that have bought or considered Predpol's predictive policing services?

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/10/30/el-monte-and-tacoma.html

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Holy Philip K. Dick, Batman. WTF?

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Someone better call Pre-Crime!

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Is it intentional, unfortunate, or a useful unintended heads up that “pred” works equally well as shorthand for “predatory” as “predictive”?

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Holy PKD, indeed. For example:

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Man they really didn’t think that name through.

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Ugh, the marriage of the worst tendencies of techbros and authoritarian government. Ignore the very real information and preferences that their userbase/populace has, and forging ahead with what works for them and gins up more revenue. It has echoes of the community policing vs. broken windows debate. Do we build relationships in the community so that actual living, breathing epople can help us help make their communities the way they want, or do we use a dumb algorithm (presence of graffiti or broken window) to unleash holy hell.

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Let’s turn this upside down, maybe, and try to predict when and where human rights abuses are most likely to occur. Perhaps something could then be done about it, using those predictions…

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Oh fuckbeans.

My town is on that list.

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that’s what I came here to say.

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Oh yes! Yes, the did. I can hear them giggling in the boardroom.

Apartheid v2.0

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I guess Dyn-i-Rite and Jackboot Technologies were taken.

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I keep reading it wrong and wondering if it is for the catholic priest police force

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There’s a tendency among those who push surveillance tech to push the debate away from questioning whether it should exist and toward whether or not it can be deployed accurately and fairly. When we accept these terms, we’ve already lost.

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Demos? 

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So as tax paying citizens, we are paying cops to do a job, that they pay someone us to do?
Sounds like they should explain why we should pay them?
Sure, a corporation directing our police, I’m sure that ends well.

With complete self-unawareness, the law enforcement industrial complex has called using data mining to facilitate predictive policing crime mining. Given the connotations of that vis a vis the MMORPG meaning of “mining,” that’s pretty dystopian. Crime mining stops being about what the computers do and starts to mean what the police do. “Level Up Officer Krupke!”

Asked my brother about this, since he is an ex-patrol cop a few towns away from one of these cities.

He said it is interesting, but is not sure what value it brings to the table. The police have been mapping out crime geographically for ages, so the speculation is that this is just an automation tool with some big data marketing snake oil on top.

Some background: his police department has been hailed for the way they addressed the significant gang and drug activity. 2012 had 0 murders for a population of over 200k, and a big part of how they got there is community outreach.

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