Is Crime Prediction Analytics Discriminatory or Life-Saving?
Critics of the program warn it will lead police to make arrests based on a bias. Proponents say that the analysis and interpretation of data will help police best use and manage their scarce resources.
It sounds like something out of a dystopian movie like Minority Report, but crime prediction analysis is already occurring or in development at 14 police forces in the United Kingdom. Started as a project called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS) run by West Midlands Police, the analytics program is becoming more popular in the UK, to the horror and fascination of some citizens.
Through the NDAS program, the West Midlands Police force has formed its own in-house data lab with a team of full-time data scientists to conduct the analysis and interpretation of the data. In total, the analysis includes 1400 indicators and 30 factors in order to evaluate an individuals’ propensity to violent crime.
With this data, they are using predictive data analysis in order to identify people who are considered to be at the highest risk of increasing their behavior to become perpetrators of knife and gun violence. They looked at a group of felons who have committed gun or knife crimes, and evaluated their datasets in order to find a group of predictive indicators that led to them committing violent crime.With those predictive indicators, police believe they can find individuals who are on a similar track and intervene to offer support before they get to the point of gun or knife crime. Superintendent Donnelly thinks that in the future they will begin to use other kinds of data from many sources such as education, health, or social services, in order to make clearer predictions and insights.
It does not take much imagination to see a situation where this technology is used in a discriminatory way to make conclusions about a person based on their past. Police intend to use Artificial Intelligence (AI) coupled with their data analysis to make the predictions, but human rights groups argue that this will only further embed human biases into our criminal justice system. West Midlands Police Force and other UK police forces have created an ethics panel to look into the human rights concerns of the project. Strategic Adviser to NDAS Tom McNeil says, “We want to see analytics being used to justify investment in social mobility in this time of harmful austerity, addressing deep-rooted inequalities and helping to prevent crime.”
McNeil raises another point, that the program could actually help level the playing field for systematic inequalities by identifying the root of violent crime and creating interventions before people get to that point. By this logic, it is not only a life-saving software, but life-changing. It has the potential to help vulnerable people by interceding the path they are currently on, and putting them on a less violent path.
Obviously, both sides raise valid points that need to be further discussed and considered before further expanding the program. Although the incorporation of data analytics into public safety can improve crime statistics, it can also have dire ethical ramifications.
