Good to Know — March 10, 2016
What we’re keeping an eye on this week.
Looking in the mirror: police departments are testing new algorithms to better predict police misconduct.
Early warning systems for police officers — systems that aim to forecast problematic officer behavior — have existed for years. In simple form, an early warning system might flag an officer who had more adverse interactions with the public for supervisory monitoring or counseling. But researchers at the University of Chicago are attempting to make a better early warning system, using new predictive algorithms to zero-in on the factors that explain police misbehavior. Partnering with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina, the researchers’ algorithm has identified a few key variables that best predict police misconduct. As Rob Arthur reports in FiveThirtyEight:
To build their early warning system, the University of Chicago group first looked for signals in the data that an officer might be going astray. They used a comprehensive data set of interactions between cops and the public gathered by Charlotte police officials over more than a decade. The researchers found that the most potent predictor of adverse interactions in a given year was an officer’s own history. Cops with many instances of adverse interactions in one year were the most likely to have them in the next year. Using this and other indicators, the University of Chicago group’s algorithm was better able than Charlotte’s existing system to predict trouble.
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In addition to the prognostic value of past complaints, the University of Chicago group uncovered some less obvious factors that may predict police misconduct. Incidents that officers deemed stressful were a major contributor; cops who had taken part in suicide and domestic-violence calls earlier in their shifts were much more likely to be involved in adverse interactions later in the day. It’s notable that although stressful calls emerged as a powerful predictor, right now there is no way to control which officers are dispatched to crimes based on the number or kind of previous calls during their shifts.
Read more of Arthur’s coverage on predictive policing for the police.
The FCC’s plan to make prison phone calls cheaper hits a snag — for now.
Earlier this year, the FCC lowered the rate caps on interstate calls and, for the first time, introduced new caps on intrastate calls for inmates. The new rates were introduced to stave off calls that sometimes cost $14 per minute inside prison walls, lowering the cap to 11 cents per minute for all local and long distance calls from state and federal prisons. But the rollout of those new rates will have to wait thanks to lawsuits from prison phone companies like Global Tel*Link and Securus Technologies.
On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia granted the two companies a stay of the FCC’s new order, pending the resolution of another lawsuit against the FCC — where the companies argue that the FCC overstepped its regulatory authority. “While the DC Circuit stayed implementation of new, lower rate caps, and a related rule limiting fees for certain single call services, the Court otherwise declined to delay critical reforms including implementation of caps and restrictions on ancillary fees,” the FCC said in response to the ruling. For now, the FCC’s broader phone rate cap reform will have to wait.
One-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.
A fascinating piece by Patrick Ball in Granta Magazine tries to answer what might, on the surface, seem to be a simple question: how many killings are committed by police? As Ball notes:
Approximately three-quarters of all homicide victims in America are killed by someone they know. And the real threat from strangers is quite different from what most fear: one-third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police.
This is the story of the hidden numbers of police homicides in the United States. The killings of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Walter Scott have increased the world’s attention to US police violence, yet most Americans underestimate the threat posed by the people charged with keeping them safe.
After walking through the statistical maze that is the number of police killings in the U.S., Ball concludes that:
America is a land ruled by fear. We fear that our children will be abducted by strangers, that crazed gunmen will perpetrate mass killings in our schools and theaters, that terrorists will gun us down or blow up our buildings, and that serial killers will stalk us on dark streets. All of these risks are real, but they are minuscule in probability: taken together, these threats constitute less than three per cent of total annual homicides in the US.[9] The numerically greater threat to our safety, and the largest single category of strangers who threaten us, are the people we have empowered to use deadly force to protect us from these less probable threats. The question for Americans is whether we will continue to tolerate police violence at this scale in return for protection against the quantitatively less likely threats.
