Futuristic Tech-Driven Policing Will Only Be as Good as the Cops Doing It: New at Reason

In Washington, D.C. in 2054, a Department of PreCrime determines who is going to commit a crime before it happens. The government uses three mutants, known as “precogs,” who have precise visions of future events. Police are sent in advance to arrest the not-quite-criminals and, voila, the crime rate drops to zero. That is the backdrop of the movie, “Minority Report,” based on a story from the late Orange County sci-fi writer Philip Dick.

Dystopian stories take real-life trends and extrapolate them far into the future, as a way to explore the moral conundrums of current policies. Flash forward 17 years from the movie’s release (or back 35 years from the future!), and we find the Los Angeles Police Department wanting to impose its own version of what is known as “predictive policing.” Instead of mutants, LAPD uses computers and human analysts.

The department pinpointed high-crime LASER zones—Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration—and tried to determine where to deploy a greater police presence. That sounded OK, but the computer system also created a profile of actual people who might have a propensity to commit crimes based on data about gang membership and arrest records. That’s startling.

The inspector general found that “44 percent of chronic offenders had either zero or one arrest for violent crimes” and “about half had no arrest for gun-related crimes,” according to a Los Angeles Times report, which noted that LAPD ultimately suspended the tool. Apparently, these technologies work better in the movies.

It reminds me of the state attorney general’s APPS program (Armed Prohibited Persons System), which sends agents to the homes of people who are no longer are deemed eligible to own firearms. It sounds like a great way to remove guns from “bad guys,” until one realizes that the complex computer-generated lists are woefully inaccurate, according to some reports. Our government cannot get its current databases right, so how could we expect it to predict the future, asks Stephen Greenhut.

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