Tuesday, May 24, 2016

"We're Making a List, We're Using Our Head. Gonna Find Out Whose Shootie or Dead;" Chicago Police Edition

CHICAGO — In this city’s urgent push to rein in gun and gang violence, the Police Department is keeping a list. Derived from a computer algorithm that assigns scores based on arrests, shootings, affiliations with gang members and other variables, the list aims to predict who is most likely to be shot soon or to shoot someone. ... The authorities hope that knowing who is most likely to be involved in violence can bring them a step closer to curtailing it. They are warning those highest on the list that they are under intense scrutiny, while offering social services to those who want a path away from the bloodshed.

About three years into the program and on a fourth revision of the computer algorithm that generates the list, critics are raising pointed questions about potential breaches to civil liberties in the creation of such a ranking. And the list’s efficacy remains in doubt as killings and shootings have continued to rise this year.
"Potential breaches to civil liberties"? That's a laugh. Trashing the Constitution is what the Chicago PD is most known for. That, and corruption.

5 comments:

  1. Minority Report, for real, but with realistic technological savvy? What could go wrong?

    I like the "offering social services" part. Were Republicans able to defund that program before it actually existed? Or did they have to do it on the first day?

    ReplyDelete
  2. TO be fair, the Chicago Police deal with the south side scum of the earth. Not an excuse, mind you, but those folks don't react like normal people. You or I would likely be turned by working in that environment.

    Many of those folks are no better than animals.....I worked on the south side many years ago. Was a war zone then. Now it is worse.

    ReplyDelete
  3. They have what I think is a similar program in Oakland, I'm not sure where OPD gets the data, but they offer certain gang-affiliated people (ones they don't have enough on to convict) certain opportunities to stop gang banging and get a life. From what I've read it works until it doesn't, read that they just issued some warrants for some folks who didn't get with the program. The article wasn't clear about whether or not they were going to be made examples of.

    -Doug in Oakland

    ReplyDelete
  4. B, that's the thing that should make us all ashamed. We're not talking about aliens or robots or yeah, animals... We're talking about people (that would have been just like us, in a just world.)

    We should all look at disasters like that and ask ourselves what would it take for me to act like that? Imagine really hard, because that's really already happened to these people. And we let it happen, inside our own borders. Pictures of slums and ghettos, and stories about what goes on inside, should fill each and every one of us with unrelieved shame.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Real life "Person of Interest"…

    - Jack

    ReplyDelete

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