Your reply is rather aggressive for not apparent reason. As I said this is highly political in the middle of the current hysteria.
Ask the disproportionate number of Black men in prison. Ask white rapist Brock Turner why a white judge wanted to let off "because he's a good boy", or the Central Park Five or the Georgetown Jacket Three that spent decades in prison because white cops and prosecutors assumed their guilt based on the color of their skin.
If my posts sounds aggressive, it's because your posts are dismissive of the terrible culture that's led to the biased data that would be used to make predictions, and you have the gall to claim it's all fine and dandy.
> current hysteria
There is no hysteria going on right now, it's a quite reasonable response to decades of bad decision making on the part of police departments across the U.S.
Predictive policing is nothing more than police presence. If police arrests innocents and the justice system sends them to prison that's quite another issue. On the whole I suspect that the number of innocents sent to prison is rather low.
There's hysteria alright on 'racial issues' at the moment.
How do you think people get arrested? They show up at a police precinct and turn themselves in?
> There's hysteria alright on 'racial issues' at the moment.
Yeah, I'm sure the Civil Rights & Suffrage movements were just "hysteria" too right?
If the police were trained well, then I might agree with you. But they're not. They're trained to expect every encounter to result in an attempt on their lives. They're trained to escalate instead of de-escalate, meaning that a run-of-the-mill interaction is more likely to result in violence than it needs to be.
Labeling what's going on now as "the current hysteria" is painfully dismissive of the real harm that police are doing to people.
This is a dangerously irresponsible statement.
If police are disproportionally spending time in specific neighborhoods, and arrests are disproportionally made from that population vs. actual crimes committed, this will be captured and reinforced in the predictions.
So yes, it's racists and it harms people.