“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.