｢ The country’s far-right president Javier Milei this week created the Artificial Intelligence Applied to Security Unit, which the legislation says will use “machine-learning algorithms to analyse historical crime data to predict future crimes”. It is also expected to deploy facial recognition software to identify “wanted persons”, patrol social media, and analyse real-time security camera footage to detect suspicious activities ｣

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/01/argentina-ai-predicting-future-crimes-citizen-rights

#ai #argentina #predpol #humanrights

Predictive Policing Software Terrible At Predicting Crimes
https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes

We examined 23,631 predictions... Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category...

Records showed that none of the five arrests that occurred in prediction locations during the time period of our analysis could have conceivably been due to officers responding to a Geolitica prediction...

#Predpol #Geolitica #future #overpolicing #prediction

#Algorithms #PredictivePolicing #PredPol #CrimePredicition: "Crime predictions generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, rarely lined up with reported crimes, an analysis by The Markup has found, adding new context to the debate over the efficacy of crime prediction software.

Geolitica, known as PredPol until a 2021 rebrand, produces software that ingests data from crime incident reports and produces daily predictions on where and when crimes are most likely to occur.

We examined 23,631 predictions generated by Geolitica between Feb. 25 to Dec. 18, 2018 for the Plainfield Police Department (PD). Each prediction we analyzed from the company’s algorithm indicated that one type of crime was likely to occur in a location not patrolled by Plainfield PD. In the end, the success rate was less than half a percentage point. Fewer than 100 of the predictions lined up with a crime in the predicted category, that was also later reported to police.

Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent."

https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes

Nationwide protests against anti-Black racism and police violence have sparked demands and reckonings in several corners of higher education and academe.

The latest to join the fray is the discipline of #mathematics.

Ten mathematicians from eight universities and one company wrote an open letter calling for mathematicians to cease collaborating with police departments. The letter also urges math scholars to publicly audit influential algorithms and to embed learning outcomes related to #ethics in #data #science curriculums.

"It's a political belief, that collaborating with police in any capacity contributes to white supremacist violence and oppression," said #Tarik #Aougab, a math professor at Haverford College and one of the letter writers, speaking personally on his motivations. "Really any collaboration between mathematics, which is something that I love and that I find extremely beautiful, and the institution of policing shouldn't happen."

The letter has 1,500 verified signatures from mathematicians, Aougab said, although that number is not limited to academic mathematicians. The letter has been submitted to and accepted by the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

The letter writers take particular aim at "predictive policing," which involves using data and mathematics to predict where crime will happen.

"Many of our colleagues can and do work with police departments to provide modeling and data work," the letter said, noting that in 2016 the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (#ICERM) at Brown University held a one-week workshop on #predictive #policing.

#PredPol, a major predictive policing company, says that its technology is being used to protect one out of every 33 people in the United States.

Opposition to predictive policing is not new. Academics have raised concerns in recent years about the mathematical theory underlying the technology and its tendency to create self-reinforcing feedback loops ("It is predicting future policing, not future crime," said a 2017 paper on the subject).

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/06/24/mathematicians-urge-cutting-ties-police