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Re:Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. f... by lobotryas on Friday June 26, 2020 @04:14PM (#23656448)
You wrote a lot but pointed out none of the flaws of this tech. What’s so alarming about drawing a conclusion that more police resources need to be allocated to a place that has a history of criminal activity?
Re:Santa Cruz, California bans predictive policing in U.S. f... by kelnos on Friday June 26, 2020 @04:39PM (#23656764)
When an authoritative figure with no accountability (the software) tells you to expect bad people, you expect bad people. Even if there are no bad people, or only a few bad people, you will invent bad people because you are primed to find them.

So you end up punishing people for small infractions that are occurring everywhere, even in the so-called "good" neighborhoods that you're ignoring. (Let's also recall that broken-windows policing doesn't actually work.) This just reinforces the software's opinion that all the bad behavior is occurring in these same neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, cops enter the "bad" neighborhood on mental high alert, expecting a high level of trouble ("if the computer sent us here, it must be bad!"), even if there isn't much trouble at all. This creates an "us vs. them" mentality, which leads to dehumanization, and you can expect higher levels of police violence, especially of the unjustified kind.