A beautiful satire asks: What if we brought “predictive policing” to business crime?
Earlier this week, The New Inquiry unveiled White Collar Crime Risk Zones, a tongue in cheek proof of concept that uses real data — and the same techniques police are eagerly embracing with street crime — to predict the future locations of white collar lawbreaking. There’s an interactive web version, an iPhone app, and even a technical paper describing their methods.
At Upturn, we’ve worked for more than a year on the real risks of predictive policing tools, which use past crime data to tell the police where to go next or who to focus on. Our report, Stuck in a Pattern, surveyed the nation’s 50 largest police departments last summer, and found that at least 31 of the top 50 have either piloted or adopted these methods. But almost no one has actually tested whether these systems work. And the little data we have suggests that all the fancy math gives the illusion of precision without adding real insight. Here’s how Logan and I summed things up:
We are currently aware of two rigorous, scholarly studies of predictive policing in the United States whose authors have no interest in the success of the method being evaluated…. Neither analysis found any safety benefit in the predictive policing tools studied.
The new app can work its claimed magic wherever you look: here’s a heatmap of white collar crime risk, centered on Upturn’s offices in downtown Washington. The map analyzes places, not people, but that face in the corner is “data-driven,” too: It’s an automated amalgam from 7,000 LinkedIn profile pics of actual financial executives.
Look at that: Our neighborhood is red! The color of hazard. A map like this is powerful even when it doesn’t give you any real information — perhaps especially when it doesn’t — because it brings a veneer of neutral authority to suspicions you may have had in the first place.
The main thing these tools create is suspicion, not insight.
The map relies on several real predictive policing methods, including Risk Terrain Modeling (a tool developed by researchers at Rutgers), where features of terrain that are thought to correlate with crime are used to guide police attention. In this case, the satirists explain, they were looking at a combination of geodata on investment advisors, bar locations, and the density of tax-exempt organizations, to predict FINRA-recognized crimes.
The project, from Brooklyn tech activists Frances Tseng, Brian Clifton, and Sam Lavigne, joins a proud tradition of apps and games that make you think, for real.
This is somewhere on the frontier between performance art, tech startup, and political critique.
Is it a game? Not exactly. But, like the compulsively playable Parable of the Polygons by Nicky Case, or the Ethical Ad Blocker, it uses running code to force a social conversation. Places like Eyeo are all about this kind of work.
Yesterday The New Inquiry used its new app as a jumping off point for a Twitter teach-in by Josmar Trujillo on the injustice of suspicionless gang raids, and the value of grassroots groups working to make neighborhoods safer. I guess left of center political journals should publish more iPhone apps. (And draw more subscribers — the best $2 I’ve spent in a while.)
The irreverence and whimsy here open a window on something all too real: Computerized finger-pointing can make cops feel more confident without adding real information, and in heavily policed, mostly black and brown communities, that puts people’s lives and freedom at risk. People really are trying to divine criminal guilt from photos of faces, and police really do send boys to jail for who their friends are.
Will we ever use spurious maps to send white collar fraudsters to jail? Probably not. Will we ever spark a similar degree of indignity and absurdity in our real-word approach to other, less glamorous crimes? We already do.
Thanks for reading. This first appeared in Equal Future, a short newsletter on tech and social justice that Upturn publishes every Thursday (here’s an example). If you’re interested, here’s the signup link for Equal Future.
