One of the The most notable example of the use of predictive technology is the story of Robert McDaniel, detailed by journalist Matt Stroud. in Verge in May 2021. McDaniel is a resident of Austin, a Chicago neighborhood that has seen 72 murders, almost 10 percent of the city’s total, just in 2020. Despite the fact that McDaniel was not violent at all (he was arrested for selling pots and spinning the dice), a predictive police show by the Chicago Police Department in 2013 determined that he was a “person of interest” – morally. inside 2011-16 CBS crime drama of the same name, “The Machine”, created by the main character of the show, can only determine that a person will be the victim or perpetrator of a violent crime, but not. Similarly, the algorithm used by CPD indicates that McDaniel is 99.9% more likely than the population of Chicago to participate in a shooting, although it is unclear what weapon he used.
Armed with this “knowledge,” Chicago police officers placed McDaniel on their Strategic Target List, later known as the “heat list,” and kept a close eye on him, despite his We are not suspected of being involved in any particular crime. Because some of that surveillance was made public, it suggested to others in his neighborhood that he might have some sort of connection to the police – that he was perhaps a supplier. information, a seriously damaged reputation.
Predictably, McDaniel has been shot twice since first being identified by the CPD: the first time in 2017, perhaps in part due to his appearance that year in a documentary by the CPD. Virtue, Crime money, that he hopes will help clear his name; and more recently in 2020. He told the Verge that both shootings were caused by the CPD watchdog itself, and led to suspicions that he was cooperating with law enforcement. “In McDaniel’s view,” Stroud writes, “the heat list causes harm that its creators hope could be avoided: It predicts a shooting that wouldn’t happen if it didn’t predict the explosion. guns”.
That is true enough, but there is also a deeper pattern to observe here. Because of past police data, McDaniel’s neighborhood, and therefore the people in it, were labeled as violent. The show then says that the future will be the same – that is, there will be no future, but just reminders of the past, more or less identical to it. This is not merely a self-fulfilling prophecy, though it certainly is: It is a system designed to bring the past into the future, and thus prevent the world from changing.
The program that McDaniel appears to have been developed specifically for CPD by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, according to Stroud’s previous report. The CPD program identified approximately 400 individuals most likely to be involved in violent crime and included them in the list. heat list. That show started in 2012 and was discontinued in 2019, as revealed that year in Chicago City Government Watchdog Report raised concerns about it, including the accuracy of its findings and its policies regarding data sharing with other agencies. The custom CPD algorithm reportedly focuses on individuals, and it may resemble a range of programs used by law enforcement and the military of which the general public has little knowledge. For example, in 2018, journalist Ali Winston reported in the Verge that the Palantir surveillance company, founded by Peter Thiel, had Secretly testing similar technology in New Orleans since 2012 without notifying many city officials.
