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Recidivism Models/LSI-R
PredPol, short for Predictive Policing, is software pioneered by a California-based start-up that uses historical crime data to show where and when crimes are most likely to occur. PredPol was pioneered to cut down on crime by allowing police to identify and patrol hotspots. But according to O’Neil, PredPol could worsen the police’s unequal treatment of white and non-white people by targeting poor and minority neighborhoods, where nuisance crimes like public drunkenness are more common.
PredPol Quotes in Weapons of Math Destruction
The Weapons of Math Destruction quotes below are all either spoken by PredPol or refer to PredPol. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 5: Civilian Casualties
Quotes
These types of low-level crimes populate their models with more and more dots, and the models send the cops back to the same neighborhood.
This creates a pernicious feedback loop. The policing itself spawns new data, which justifies more policing. And our prisons fill up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes. Most of them come from impoverished neighborhoods, and most are black or Hispanic. So even if a model is color blind, the result of it is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.
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Police make choices about where they direct their attention. Today they focus almost exclusively on the poor. […] And now data scientists are stitching this status quo of the social order into models, like PredPol, that hold ever-greater sway over our lives.
The result is that while PredPol delivers a perfectly useful and even high-minded software tool, it is also a do-it-yourself WMD. In this sense, PredPol, even with the best of intentions, empowers police departments to zero in on the poor, stopping more of them, arresting a portion of those, and sending a subgroup to prison. […]
The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair.
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PredPol Term Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
The timeline below shows where the term PredPol appears in Weapons of Math Destruction. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 5: Civilian Casualties
...persistent crime), police chief William Heim invested in crime prediction software. The software was called PredPol (short for “predictive policing”), and it was made by a Big Data start-up based in...
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...poor, so it’s clear that they have a choice in where they direct their attentions. PredPol is, according to O’Neil, essentially a “do-it-yourself WMD.” Its inner workings are hidden from the...
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...good schools and job opportunities are more likely to be highly policed. So, WMDs like predictive policing and recidivism models used for sentencing guidelines are inherently racially biased and logically flawed. Even...
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