Moneyball in criminal justice
Predicting crime; is it science fiction or reality? And what about our privacy?
I have been watching a series called “The Wire” and it made me think about how safe I actually feel while walking the streets in the Netherlands. It impacted the way I look at the city of Rotterdam even if you compare it with other places such as Baltimore, Maryland where the series is about. I decided to start doing some investigation on the topic and decided to write a blog about it.
15 years ago predicting crime seemed like an unrealistic, very abstract concept. Nowadays fighting crime by smart statistics and rigorous analysis is in the lift. More and more police departments across the world are trialing or implementing the techniques. Predictions go as far as determining where and when the most likely crime will be happening and estimating to what degree there is possibility of relapse with a certain offender (Milgram, 2013)(Accenture, 2012). A common mistake people make is confusing predictive analytics with Minority Reporting. However, Minority Reporting is about the question who while predictive analytics seeks to find the answer to the questions when and where.
In a TED talk by Anne Milgram that I watched, the previous attorney general of the state of New Jersey, she explained how she came to change the way she saw criminal justice. One of her main realizations was the fact that there was no knowledge about who were in the criminal justice systems, no data availability, no data sharing between departments, and no expertise on what was important to look at. In addition, she explains how decisions-making were made based on instinct and experience. Her conclusion was, looking at the entire justice system under her jurisdiction, that they were not doing a good job. This is what triggered her to implement rigorous data analyses and smart statistics to fight crime. The result was that murders reduced with 41% and crimes decreased with 26%.
Nevertheless, numerous questions could be raised. For example: How good are the data used? Is crime data vulnerable to manipulation and error? How do we know the underlying algorithm are not erroneous? Is our right to privacy protected? (Huffington Post, 2015)
To me all these questions and concerns raised are nullified when you look at examples provided by people like Anne Milgram. These numbers tell an important story. In my eyes these numbers matter greatly; public safety is of utmost importance since without it we cannot be educated, we cannot be healthy, we cannot exercise and we cannot be happy.
However, fact is that with big data, privacy issues remain on the surface. Personally, I believe privacy issues are less important than our safety. Unfortunately, there are struggles that come with ‘small data’ being replaced by ‘big data’.
Ask yourself a question: What if the “reasonable suspicion” doctrine of seizing and interrogating a suspect is being challenged by an interconnected web of data and knowledge combined (Ferguson, 2014)?
I believe you cannot fight crime with little yellow post-it notes. What about you?
References
Accenture, (2015). London Police Force Uses Analytics to Fight Gang Crime – Accenture. [online] Available at: https://www.accenture.com/id-en/success-london-police-force-using-analytics-fight-gang-crime.aspx [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].
Berg, N. (2014). Predicting crime, LAPD-style. [online] the Guardian. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/25/predicting-crime-lapd-los-angeles-police-data-analysis-algorithm-minority-report [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].
ComputerWeekly, (2015). Met Police trials analytics to fight gang crime. [online] Available at: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240233449/Met-Police-trial-analytics-to-fight-gang-crime [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].
Datafloq, (2015). Datafloq – The One-Stop Shop for Big Data. [online] Available at: https://datafloq.com/read/los-angeles-police-department-predicts-fights-crim/279 [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].
Ferguson, A. (2014). Big Data and Predictive Reasonable Suspicion. SSRN Electronic Journal.
The Huffington Post, (2015). Predicting Predictive Policing in NYC. [online] Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-guthrie-ferguson/predicting-predictive-pol_b_7757200.html [Accessed 7 Oct. 2015].
Breaking up with your iPhone
I admit it: I am an iPhone addict. But while I’m writing this blog post I am looking at my roommates: one watching television while texting her hockey friend; the other one sitting on the stairs fighting with her boyfriend; and the last one studying, like me, while checking her iPhone every minute or so. The only one really focusing on what she is doing seems to be the one fighting…
Now I would like to ask you to think about this: how many times a day do you check your smartphone? To check how many likes you got on that picture you uploaded 15 minutes ago? Or who sent you a message over Whatsapp?
The age of the smartphone started in 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 1. His words, “This will change everything”, did not go in vain. Now, eight years down the line this invention did indeed change everything: from our personal lives to our interpersonal relationships; from the way we do business to the way we do our groceries. Our smartphone is interweaved in almost every aspect of our lives.
Although the introduction of the smartphone made our lives easier, more comfortable, and more safe in many ways there is also a shadow side: the growing smartphone addiction. Only in Europe more than 50% of the children between 9 and 16 reported overdependence related to their smartphone usage.
Mobile phone usage has been linked to (The Huffington Post, 2012):
- Stress
- Sleep deprivation
- Symptoms of depression
In the report published by Net Children Go Mobile in 2014, almost three out of four children (72%) said to “feel they have to be always available to family and friends”. This social pressure might result into anxiety and stress for the younger generation. Also the “entrapment” of feeling you have to be available 24/7 and reply as soon as you read a message could increase the anxiety among these young children (Net Children Go Mobile, 2014).
It is interesting to see how those small technological devices can have such a substantial impact on our mental, and sometimes even physical, wellbeing. Many of us seem to have come to see them as an extension of who we are. How is it even possible there was a big connection between our heart rate and blood pressure surging when our phone is ringing across the room from us but we can’t reach it (Steinmetz, 2015)?
We are the first generation to grow up digitally native, while these developments show alarming facts about just us, our generation, growing up.
What do you think? Should we break up with our smartphones every once in a while…?
Singer, M., (2014). Smartphone addiction among European kids – Market Business News. [online] Market Business News. Available at: http://marketbusinessnews.com/smartphone-addiction-among-european-kids/23575 [Accessed 26 Sep. 2015].
Steinmetz, K. (2015). Here’s How to Battle Your Smartphone Addiction. [online] TIME.com. Available at: http://time.com/3952333/smartphone-addiction/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2015].
The Huffington Post, (2015). Heavy Technology Use Linked to Fatigue, Stress and Depression in Young Adults. [online] Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-volpi-md-pc-facs/technology-depression_b_1723625.html [Accessed 26 Sep. 2015].
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