“PREDICTIVE POLICING” NOW PART OF NORMAL NYPD OPERATIONS

Posted on August 11, 2015 by Joseph P. Farrell • http://gizadeathstar.com/2015/08/predictive-policing-now-part-of-normal-nypd-operations/

If you saw the Tom Cruise movie Minority Report, based on the science fiction of one of my favorite sci-fi authors, Philip K. Dick, you'll recall that the USA had erected a Department of Pre-Crime (reliant, incidentally, not on software or artificial intelligence computers, but on genetically engineered psychics). This department would quite literally arrest, detain, try, and convict an individual in a secret star-chamber proceeding based on predictions that they were going to commit a crime. A moment's thought about this will reveal that it is an egregious kind of pseudoscience - which, I boldly suggest, much of modern science and its experts have become - parading as justice, for the underlying assumption asks us to believe that future probabilities are deterministic in nature, not in spite of human personality or free will, but in a sense, because of it. That, in its turn, if one thinks about it a little bit, and when phrased that way, is one of those noodle-baking conundrums that modern scientism seems to present us with.
But the science fiction of Dick is no longer science fiction, as this article from our old friends at The Daily Bell indicates:
NYPD to Launch Future Crime Unit
Note what the article sites, and what it actually says:

Predictive policing, an unproven and controversial data-mining method intended to anticipate the location and participants or victims in future crimes, is now an integral part of the largest police department in the United States. During a recent panel, New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton declared that predictive policing "is the wave of the future," and that "the 'Minority Report' of 2002 is the reality of today."
Bratton's remarks, which are the most candid he has been about the department's use of data mining, came during a discussion about Big Data, hosted by The New York Times, with editor Charles Duhigg and former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg.
"There are no secrets. There are none. If two people share a piece of information, it is no longer secret," Bratton said in response to a question by Duhigg regarding the risks of data collection.
New York police are "data mining huge amounts of information and developing algorithms that will effectively mine that data in many ways the human brain cannot," said Bratton, referring to the department's trawling of social media and crime data, as well as other information gathered by city agencies, to predict where public safety threats could arise. The department's Intelligence Division and anti-gang units already monitor social media accounts of people suspected of criminal activity, as well as those considered at risk of falling victim to violent crime. – Reveal News, July 31, 2015 

And later, this:

NYPD is launching a two-year test of "predictive policing" software called Hunchlab. The goal: Analyze criminal activity patterns and deploy resources more efficiently. That would be fine if NYPD and its commissioner knew how to respect privacy. The evidence, and his words, say they do not.
Bratton led the Los Angeles Police Department to install a network of TV cameras, gunshot detectors and license plate readers plus map the city's entire Muslim population just in case it harbored an extremist. He did the same in New York, and spied on political activists during the 2004 Republican National Convention, too. NYPD has repeatedly violated a 1985 consent decree for privacy violation. So we have reason to be skeptical when the Commish calls for yet more domestic intelligence gathering.
Not to fear, says Bratton. "Citizens should trust his department to not abuse its power and to remain within the bounds of the law," he said at a recent event. Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Byrne says the public safety benefits will outweigh potential civil liberties violations.

"Trust us,"....uhm... yea sure... NOT.

As The Daily Bell rightly observes, perfect security never occurs, in spite of the constant calls of policiticans for more expanded surveillance power, while demonstrating little reason why we, or anyone else, should trust them.

The real implication here, is more disturbing, really, even than Dick's science fiction or the movie adaptation of the same, for note that the algorithms of such predictive policing software are still a far cry from being able to predict individual behavior, including its possible individual criminal behavior. Given the analogy I have been drawing repeatedly in my books and blogs about the close affiliation of finance (and hence human behavior) and quantum mechanics (and particularly the emergence of the "quants", the physics graduates who entered finance and took their mathematical modeling tools with them to construct our high frequency trading algorithms, dark pools, and the whole new discipline of econophysics), one can no easier predict the behavior of an individual human being, than one can an individual sub-atomic particle. Indeed, doing so in the individual human's case, a much more complex phenomenon than a mere particle, is perhaps stretching the idea of mathematical modeling to the limits.

But one might be able to do it, like particles, in groups: religious groups, socio-economic classes, racial groups, could be profiled for "future criminality" on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. Now, put that with Dick's science-fiction speculations, and you get my high octane speculation, and where this is headed: for now, the Daily Bell is assuring us that the program is only being used to commit law enforcement resources to places where the algorithms predict higher probabilities of future criminality.

And from there, of course, it is - for our modern politicians, corrupt plutocratic and scientismist "experts" - only a short step from the advocacy of the preemptive placement deployment of resources, to the preemptive use of them, against groups.

We've been down that road before. The only difference this time is that the experts have taken off the swastika armbands. But they're no more to be trusted now, than they were then.