Brave New World of 'Predictive Policing' Raises Specter of High-Tech Racial Profiling Bryan Llenas - Fox News Latino
go to original March 4, 2014

Predictive Policing: Don't Even Think About It - A new approach to policing—responding to crimes that haven't even happened yet. (The Economist)

Most Americans have probably never heard of “predictive policing,” even if their lives already have been deeply affected by it. And one of the nation’s largest police forces, the Chicago Police Department, thanks to federal funding, is now helping to drive policing into territory previously only dreamed of in science fiction: The ability to essentially predict who will be the next perpetrator or the next victim of a crime.

To minority groups, the mere thought of such a police tactic immediately raises all kinds of questions about civil rights and racial profiling.

At the heart of this trend in how police departments operate are complicated computer algorithms that run off highly detailed crime data. In the last couple of years, police departments around the country, from Los Angeles to Memphis, Tenn., to Charleston, S.C., have started forecasting future crimes, many of them thanks to federal funding. In the case of L.A., the algorithm being used once helped predict earthquake aftershocks.

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