The real-life risks of predictive policing—and what one city is doing differently
The 2002 sci-fi thriller Minority Report depicts a dystopian future where a specialized police unit is tasked with arresting people for crimes they have not yet committed. Directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, the drama revolves around 'PreCrime'—a system informed by a trio of psychics, or 'precogs,' who anticipate future homicides, allowing police officers to intervene and prevent would-be assailants from claiming their targets' lives.
The film probes at hefty ethical questions: How can someone be guilty of a crime they haven't yet committed? And what happens when the system gets it wrong?
While there is no such thing as an all-seeing 'precog,' key components of the future that Minority Report envisions have become reality even faster than its creators imagined. For more than a decade, police departments across the globe have been using data-driven systems geared toward predicting when and where crimes might occur and who might commit them.
Far from an abstract or futuristic conceit, predictive policing is a reality. And market analysts are predicting a boom for the technology.
Given the challenges in using predictive machine learning effectively and fairly, predictive policing raises significant ethical concerns. Absent technological fixes on the horizon, there is an approach to addressing these concerns: Treat government use of the technology as a matter of democratic accountability.
Troubling history
Predictive policing relies on artificial intelligence and data analytics to anticipate potential criminal activity before it happens. It can involve analyzing large datasets drawn from crime reports, arrest records and social or geographic information to identify patterns and forecast where crimes might occur or who may be involved.
Law enforcement agencies have used data analytics to track broad trends for many decades. Today's powerful AI technologies, however, take in vast amounts of surveillance and crime report data to provide much finer-grained analysis.
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