"Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime prediction software called PredPol.

The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server.

The Markup and Gizmodo a***yzed them and found persistent patterns.

Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle- to upper-income. Many of these areas went years without a single crime prediction.

By contrast, neighborhoods the software targeted for increased patrols were more likely to be home to Blacks, Latinos, and families that would qualify for the federal free and reduced lunch program.

These communities weren’t just targeted more—in some cases they were targeted relentlessly. Crimes were predicted every day, sometimes multiple times a day, sometimes in multiple locations in the same neighborhood: thousands upon thousands of crime predictions over years. A few neighborhoods in our data were the subject of more than 11,000 predictions.

The software often recommended daily patrols in and around public and subsidized housing, targeting the poorest of the poor."

themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-new-data-shows-it-perpetuates-them

" Neighborhoods in Portage, Mich., where PredPol recommended police focus patrols have nine times the proportion of Black residents as the city average. Looking at predictions on a map, local activist Quinton Bryant said, “It’s just giving them a reason to patrol these areas that are predominantly Black and Brown and poor folks.”

In Birmingham, Ala., where about half the residents are Black, the areas with the fewest crime predictions are overwhelmingly White. The neighborhoods with the most have about double the city’s average Latino population. “This higher density of police presence,” Birmingham-based anti-hunger advocate Celida Soto Garcia said, “reopens generational trauma and contributes to how these communities are hurting.”

In Los Angeles, even when crime predictions seemed to target a majority-White neighborhood, like the Northridge area, they were clustered on the blocks that are almost 100 percent Latino. The neighborhoods in the city where the software recommended police spend the most time were disproportionately poor and more heavily Latino than the city overall. “These are the areas of L.A. that have had the greatest issues of biased policing,” said Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of the L.A.-based Latino civil rights group MALDEF.

About 35 miles outside of Boston, in Haverhill, Mass., PredPol recommended police focus their patrols in neighborhoods that had three times the Latino population and twice the low-income population as the city average. “These are the communities that we serve,” said Bill Spirdione, associate pastor of the Newlife Christian Assembly of God and executive director of the Common Ground food pantry.

In the Chicago suburb of Elgin, Ill., neighborhoods with the fewest crime predictions were richer, with a higher proportion than the city average of families earning $200,000 a year or more. The neighborhoods with the most predictions didn’t have a single one; instead, they had twice as many low-income residents and more than double the percentage of Latino residents as the city average. “I would liken it to policing bias-by-proxy,” Elgin Police Department deputy chief Adam Schuessler said in an interview. The department has stopped using the software."

the visuals at the beginning of the article are wild

this is the real "threat" of AI

Funding programs to decrease the need for anybody to commit crimes

Funding techbros to create AI to "predict" future crimes before they happen

just terrible

Psycho-Pass

Freedom of speech tho

They cant predict them mass shottings ever tho huh

Defund that program