Predictive Policing : Algorithmic Technology

"We have to make sure that we're not putting forward technology as a solution to a problem that technology actually cannot solve."                                                   "The idea is [to] pinpoint with more accuracy where crime is more likely to happen, send officers to that particular [area] and deter the alleged future crime before it happens."                                                                                                              "We don't have a specific legal safeguard that says whether or not it's appropriate and sufficiently protective of privacy rights to re-purpose [those] databases in this way."                                                                                                                                           Cynthia Khoo, research fellow, technology and human rights lawyer, Citizen Lab, Toronto

Officer Shane Kovach patrols Homewood, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, neighborhood where predictive policing will soon be introduced. Stephanie Strasburg

Police agencies have professional experience in community safety and security and they have the invaluable intuition of seasoned officers to help in the never-ending confrontation between law and order and social alienation and criminal activities to help them distinguish which levels of society, which groups within society and which neighbourhoods in community settings may be largely responsible for anti-social and criminal acts harming the whole of society. Police then respond within the parameters of allowable protocols in aid and protection of community interests.

It's a difficult job, one fraught with problems as well as exposure to personal dangers, and liable to complaints from marginalized groups, ethnic groups, and those mired in poverty, simply because it is frequently from among those disaffected groups who view themselves as victims of society that much crime emanates. Usually white collar crimes are committed by the educated, by the well-off classes of society. Crimes of violence more generally from among those disenchanted with society for whom it is claimed equality is an elusive goal.

"The most significant weakness of the predictive aspects of these models is the difficulty of identifying, anticipating, and factoring in the impact of the variables expected to influence future crime trends. The quantitative models identified in this research did not, and probably could not, factor in the vast array of variables that may influence crime; most of the time series models used to predict future crime rates only took into consideration one or two key influential (demographic and macro-economic) variables. While there is substantial evidence of the impact that these variables have on the crime rate, a key reason they are used in crime forecasts is that their trends can also be quantitatively documented, and hence, forecasted into the future. What is absent from these mathematical models is the integration of influential variables that are more difficult to quantify through historical time series data such as technology, life-style changes, criminal justice responses, and the level of private security and crime prevention efforts undertaken by the public."   Predicting Crime: The Review of Research, Department of Justice, Government of Canada

That, in any event is the view of the progressive mind that feels the law should use a different standard of expectation on those whose backgrounds are less than ideal, citing childhood traumas, unequal treatment and poverty as causatives for social alienation that edges into gangs, drugs, guns and violence. Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research group, has issued a report warning that the police use of algorithmic policing technology may infringe on the privacy of residents and impinge on their Charter rights.

Algorithmic policing may be new to Canada, relatively speaking, but it is advanced in the U.S. and U.K. in particular. A few forces in Canada are making use of algorithmic policing and Citizen Lab is warning against its use, calling for a halt until federal authorities complete a judicial enquiry into its use and its pitfalls. The Vancouver police department makes use of a machine learning-based system they launched four years ago in forecasting where break-and-enter crimes are likely to occur, responding by dispatching officers to patrol those areas.

Sounds sensible, doesn't it? It's proactive, stopping crimes before they occur by the simple medium of showing up, becoming more visible, the result being that the presence of police is sufficient in itself for deterring potential criminal acts from proceeding. A partnership between the provincial government, university and the Saskatoon police force feeds police data into a model to identify youth at risk of going missing. A much-needed alert that can prevent young people from taking desperate action that often does them great harm.

In Toronto and in Calgary, law enforcement agencies used social media surveillance techniques even as the RCMP put out a tender for similar services which other countries have used more widely. In the U.K., forces use facial recognition and automated risk-assessment systems. The Los Angeles Police Department ended a program using Palantir technology in response to intense protests and criticism from the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, while retaining another crime location prediction system.

In Saskatchewan, authorities decided they would build an in-house system "to avoid the issues that they know can come with proprietary software", explained Ms.Khoo, to avoid private sector vendors charging that the details of their technology were breached. Citing commercial confidentiality, some forces chose to withhold documents that Citizen Lab's freedom-of-information requests sought, to aid in their research.

Predictive policing is built around algorithms that identify potential crime hotspots.. (PredPol)

Citizen Lab contends that algorithmic policing technologies could infringe on such Charter rights as freedom of expression, peaceful assembly, equality and liberty; essentially people's privacy rights. Its recommendation following the research it undertook and the conclusions it reached, was that forces not use the technique as the sole basis for arrest or detention. That court authorization be sought before deploying automated surveillance tools online in public places.

The report asks government to impose moratoriums on the use or training of algorithms on historical police data sets until such time as a national judicial inquiry examines the technology and its implications for Charter rights. Typically, historical police data is used in systems forecasting where crime may occur or whether an individual is likely to commit a crime. Numerous studies, posits the report, as well as court decisions, have pointed out that Black and Indigenous people are over-represented in carding, street-check, arrest, sentencing and incarceration data as a result of "biased criminal justice practices or systemic discrimination."

It is no great secret on the other hand, that it is from among the Black and Indigenous communities that a high proportion of criminal activity emanates and persists in emanating. The question is why should any group within society be held to a lower standard of civic behaviour than any other group? Why should expectations for respect of the law that applies equally to the entire population be lowered for these specific groups? Who may demand it, and when their goal is achieved feel it to be justified that they not respect law and order.

Black Victimhood

"The likelihood of a Black person being shot by police in Toronto is just as high as for a Black person in the average city in the United States."                                 "The time for debate about whether systemic racism or anti-Black racism exists is over."                                                                                                                         "It is incumbent upon us all to re-envision the practices, the policies, the procedures, and importantly, the perceptions that shape policing in our city."            "The disproportionality, and the disparities in the commission report are more than just statistics. They are Black lives and Black Lives Matter."                                    Ena Chadha, interim chief commissioner, Ontario Human Rights Commission

"[Black people are more likely to be] arrested, charged, overcharged, struck, shot or killed by Toronto police."                                                                                "[Black people in Toronto are] disproportionately [arrested, charged and subjected to use of force by the city's police force]."                                                                 'A Disparate Impact' report

"This disparity cannot be explained away by racial differences in criminal history, civilian behaviour towards the police at the time of the incident, civilian weapons use, civilian mental illness, civilian intoxication, or local crime rates."                   Scot Wortley, criminology professor, University of Toronto

Black Lives Matter protests in Toronto. (Evan Tsuyoshi Mitsui/CBC)

"At the end of the day, when someone calls 911 they need to know that a police officer will show up at their door." "But is there an opportunity for other community agencies to do more? Absolutely."  "[Ontario has been] very active in doing things already [by increasing investment in community mental health and addiction resources, which account for 40 percent of calls to emergency services]."                                                                                   Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones

Critics of Toronto police call for reform in the way mental health calls are treated, that mental health professionals, not police should be responding to mental health calls, pointing to the death of a 29-year-old Black woman, Regis Korchinski-Paquet who fell from a balcony while police were present in her apartment, called there by a relative who had alerted police to something going awry, wanting her taken to a mental health facility. For their part, police felt they were responding to a possible assault call. 

It's worth noting that Toronto has a (newly retiring) Black police chief, appointed back in 2015. His deputy chief was also Black, and is now Ottawa's chief of police. Many police chiefs in the United States are also Black. Some of them are Black women. Yet police in both countries are charged with prejudicial racism, that they deliberately target Blacks for suspicion of crime commission. Police are a professional public safety group. They become very familiar in the commission of their duties at every level where crime most commonly emanates from.

They also develop a fine-tuned sense of the relationship between elements of any population with the culture of crime. With gangs, drug dealing, weapons possession, and all the public/social malfeasance that follows from those propensities. Blacks do indeed become targeted for questioning, stopping, suspicion of anti-social acts, from drug dealing and weapons smuggling to competitive challenges between gangs leading to shootings, wounding and death.

That being so, they become a 'targeted' community in the sense that police, the guardians of public safety and security, are attuned to what occurs in those communities, dealing with the outcomes as best they can. Yet, in 'progressive' social cultures they come under fire by complaints and accusations that they're too hard on the criminal element among Black populations, as though being Black requires them to have special consideration. Black police and their Black police chiefs seem somehow to believe otherwise.

They respect their own cultural community to the extent that they see no reason why those within the community cannot be expected to respect society and their place within it by adhering to the public weal, eschewing criminality and living normal lives rather than choosing to be thugs, drug dealers and gang members. But the Ontario Human Rights Commission is convinced that the problem lies not with the culture of the Black underclass community but with police in general, whose reaction is too harsh.

The report published by the Ontario Human Rights commission lingered on the fact that Black people representing 8.8 percent of the population of Toronto, manage to represent close to a third of all charges. Refusing to credit the fact that smoke both precedes and follows a fire, the OHRC prefers to blame police reaction rather than a dire need for the Black social underclass to reform itself. The OHRC's first interim report after its inquiry was launched in 2017 found between 2013 and 2017 it was 20 times likelier for a Black person to be shot and killed by police than a white person.

Whether the study undertook to assess and analyze the number of Blacks shot, wounded or killed by other Blacks is as yet unknown, but that this is a problem of immense proportions certainly is not. The enquiry also highlighted that officers sometimes lack a legal basis for stopping or detaining Black people, searching them without justification, making unnecessary arrests and laying unnecessary charges. In the opinion of the Human Rights Commission obviously, which knows nothing about finely honed police intuition and experience.

The protests sparked by the police-involved death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May which led to protests and demonstrations by Black Lives Matter worldwide, that were often offensive and violent and ultimately led to the impression that among Blacks white lives don't matter, did nothing to achieve sympathy other than among 'woke' progressives whose 'guilt-by-whiteness-colonialism' sought to expunge itself through unquestioning support.

The Thin[ner] Blue Line

"It was a bit of checkmate [trying to figure out which emergency calls to respond to]. We need to support these people in crisis, but the police are not the right ones to be dealing with them."
"It was all right, the police being the jack-of-all-trades, when there was a necessary amount of funding for the police. But if you've got 20,000 less police officers, less funding, then somebody needs to make the decision about what they want us to do."
"When the criminals realize that their gang is bigger than our gang, they start exploiting that."
Constable Richard Chant, West Midlands Police Department, Birmingham, England

Prioritisation programmes are aiming to ease pressure on officers while dealing properly with the most serious crime 

PA

"We have got a budget to work to, we have demand to meet, and have to make decisions about what we prioritize."
"All incidents of crime are of the utmost importance, but of course I would much rather our detectives are investigating stabbings and diverting gang members rather than dealing with some of the work which was possible to do when numbers were not so tight."
"We have to admit there are going to be crimes that we are responding differently to than we would have in the past."
"I know this may cause concern to members of the public and perhaps lead to fears that fewer offences will be prosecuted, but I must stress that detection rates for crimes being investigated by the TDIU have not fallen. We cannot do everything in the way we could before, crime is continually changing and adapting, and our numbers are fewer. We have had to realign our resources and invest more in different areas to meet the challenges we are facing. I want to reassure the public that we are here and will do everything in our power to help."
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Mark Simmons, London Metropolitan Police

Photo: Andrew Testa / The New York Times   Investigating a burglary at a supermarket in Birmingham, England, in November. Crime is rising, but Conservative-led austerity measures have led to cutbacks in police services.

In an eight-hour period the West Midlands Police Department took 1,452 emergency calls. A number that posed too great a challenge for the force to respond to, with fewer police at their disposal as a result of lost funding due to Britain's austerity situation over fears to extending itself too greatly financially given the uncertainty of the Brexit climate and what will ensue eventually. For some of those cases hours and days transpired before the callers saw a responding officer.

Take Birmingham as an example of the new reality in law and order during this strained state of responsiveness surrendering to austerity. While the range of emergency calls and their numbers has skyrocketed both in Birmingham and in most other British cities, far fewer officers are available to respond adequately. Britain's withdrawal from the EU and the budget pressures that have been exerted are nowhere near over as far as concerns and consequences are concerned.

Since the initiation in 2010 of the Conservative government's austerity program, the West Midlands Police Department alone has had its budget cut by $220 million, while across England and Wales police staffing has been reduced by roughly 20,000 police officers, leaving questions about whether the cuts themselves are major contributors to a notable spike in violent crime. In England and Wales murders and robberies have risen to their highest levels in the past ten years.

Social services have also been pared back under austerity, creating metastasizing problems that often fall to the police.   CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Parallel cuts to social services where addiction services, housing benefits, gang mediation programs and social services for adults and children have all seen severe funding restrictions has only added to the chaos of social and security responsiveness. Police are forced to speed between emergency calls and to handle them all as best they can, so they are left with little time to patrol streets, making themselves visible to reduce the likelihood of crime.

Increasingly, police hours on health and welfare calls have left little space to collect evidence and solve crimes and as a result victims not in immediate danger must accustom themselves to waiting days for a police response, leading to a situation where the investigation of property crimes has become a vanishing low priority simply not pursued because of other, more critical areas requiring attention.

The site of a break-in attempt in Birmingham. Robberies or assaults in which the offender has left are supposed to get attention within an hour, but frequently wait days, one officer said. CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

This, in lock-step with recent decades of increasing diagnoses of severe mental illness, at the very time when services for these people have been reduced. As a result, officers in England and Wales have taken to detaining 60 percent more people in need of psychiatric services in 2015-16 than what pertained a decade ago -- while London police receive mental illness related calls once every four minutes.

The solution would appear simple enough; hire and train more officers. Taxi robberies and home break-in patterns are not being pursued simply because cases are shelved, with not even a cursory investigation, leading to a sense of hopelessness among victims who simply stop calling police. A situation very much appreciated by criminals for whom the situation is quite agreeable to their future and ongoing prospects.

Prime Minister Theresa May, in her previous incarnation as home secretary, was the original architect of the cuts. She also cracked down on corruption in police associations and stop-and-frisk tactics, and was responsible for the cutbacks in police personnel. The solution as some see it is to restore funding to social services, instead of expanding police force personnel, relieving them of the onerous task for which they are not professionally designed, of responding to mental health crises.

The British government has announced additional funding for the police forces, but public health budgets are expected to keep shrinking through 2021.   CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Serve and Protect?  Or Swerve and Neglect!

"It's definitely happening, there's no doubt about it."
"[In 70 percent of all responses police display] limited to moderate to intensive de-policing. ['De-policing is defined as] an officer choosing not to engage in discretionary or proactive aspects of police duties."
"There's a massive downside to [proactive policing], and I think they can clearly realize that."
"That [responding to 911 calls for service] is the core function of their job. When the computer [inside the cruiser] beeps, you respond to the call, go and address the call. You do what has to be done."
"If an officer responds to the calls they're responsible to respond to, they're doing their job. The rest is gravy."
"There's really no way to police de-policing."
Greg Brown, Carleton University doctoral researcher

"What you were trained to do is no longer acceptable. What is the immediate reaction? Cease any activities that would be conducive to exposing yourself."
"The results that [Brown] is experiencing throughout the entire country is what we've experienced here in Ottawa."
"The dialogue starts to have a racial component to it. It impacts the officers when they see agencies taking political positions against police officers that compounds the jeopardy a police officer already faces when they're dealing with the public. The officers feel very second-guessed."
"There seems to be an expectation that a police officer is going to driving around for ten hours of their shift, without realizing that there's a significant amount of paperwork involved for every call for service."
Matt Skof, president, Ottawa Police Association

"I would agree that officers are likely more mindful about the implications of their interactions with the public. As the saying goes, 'Once bitten twice shy'."
"However, I don't think this is creating a culture of police that are neglecting their fundamental duties of protecting the safety and security of the community. It has added another level to their decision making process, an increased awareness."
Eli El-Chantiry, chair, Ottawa Police Services Board

Officers are weighing the costs of engaging with the public and for many, the cons outweigh the pros. Photo by Ashley Fraser Ashley Fraser / Postmedia

Bollocks! Police everywhere now encounter the outrage of the public, the censure of social agencies, the backtreading of politicians and the pointed questions posed by news coverage of events where police have been tasked with dealing not only with the criminal element in society, but with its social problems, handling out-of-control people with mental illness whose instability has created public threats, requiring police to apprehend potential crimes by recognizing the presence of threats posed by visible minorities.

In their introduction to scenes of emergency responses to public threats if police respond to physical violence by matched, often controlled physical force in the execution of their duties to protect the public while also protecting themselves, the expected unexpected can occur, and the police are called to the carpet. Police experience and intuition in dealing with criminal gangs, with drug pushing and prostitution committed by an overwhelming number of Blacks, Aboriginals, Muslims, is characterized as 'targeted' against the vulnerable.

Greg Brown, the doctoral researcher was in his prior career an Ottawa police homicide and drug investigator. He knows the profession from the inside out. And it is the 'outside' of the profession that is compelling the 'inside' of policing that has created a situation where police officers have a double mission; to protect the public and to protect their own reputations and professional life in the bargain. Political correctness and self-serving victimhood on the part of civil groups disproportionately represented in crime sprees and incarceration rates have found a new voice in public support.


Their over-representation in criminal gangs, in drugs and violence, the use of firearms, and targeted killings is the sole issue that alerts police to investigate them in suspicious circumstances in hopes of preventing the commission of yet another crime. But this proactive and generally successful approach to policing has been identified as 'profiling' and has been condemned, irrespective of the fact that it represents an integrally required and useful part of the profession of serving and protecting the public.  A public which, within the target group clamours for protection but fails to cooperate with police investigations.

A useful initiative undertaken in Toronto had a mitigating presence of a police officer assigned to a specific high school to familiarize students with lawfulness, the project having a high degree of interactive success. It has been suspended by the Toronto Public School Board, however, because Black Lives Matter denounced it as primarily targeting black students. Who just happen to be responsible for most of the gang crimes. That suspension occurred despite that most students found the presence of a police officer who connected with them reassuring, including most black students.

The issue of 'carding' by police officers encountering visible minorities in potentially incriminating circumstances received wide condemnation by special-interest groups exerting enough political pressure to have the practise censured; yet another useful tool set aside in the generalized trend toward neutering policing. Greg Brown's study, the first of its kind in Canada, measuring the F.I.D.O.
phenomenon among police ("F**k it, drive on"), was undertaken with a wide survey of front-line officers encompassing 18 police services.

Police from Halifax to Vancouver, including five departments in New York State were all included in the survey of 3,600 police services personnel. In Ottawa alone, 382 police participated from 18 patrol platoons, representing close to the entire front-line. It became clear that officers weigh the costs of public engagement, finding the negatives to outweigh the positives. Interactions carrying the potential of racial profiling allegations that could end up before a disciplinary tribunal or human rights body, media scrutiny, a YouTube video or judge deliberating breach of Charter rights has become anathema.

The more mature officers happen to be in their career path, the more careful they are not to ruin their careers, let alone their lives by bringing down censure upon their law-and-order professionalism.  No longer is it automatic to pull a driver over for a Highway Traffic Act infraction, to approach a suspicious-appearing individual lurking about in an area known for high residential break-and-enters, let alone attempting to seek out wanted offenders on warrants; all considered to be proactive in nature which officers cannot to be coerced to perform.

This is the danger zone to be avoided. Self-preservation is a powerful survival tool. A wait-and-see attitude toward deployment has become the norm; initiatives in the fulfillment of policing duties are no more and where many years ago this type of attitude would have been viewed as disinterested lassitude, it is now a calculated decision related to colleague experience and the wish to avoid the misfortune visited on colleagues seeking to perform their duties in full measure.

If a racialized individual with mental health issues is behaving violently, as a threat to public security, officers approach with especial caution in the knowledge that from somewhere someone will be videotaping any confrontation so that if officers respond with force to restrain violence they will be liable for criticism should harm come to the offender. Sexuality and gender represent yet other interactions that have the potential to result in problem explanations for outcomes.

New legislation now regulates practices such as those that saw racialized young men stopped by police wanting their personal information. That new legislation altered protocol such that officers are now reluctant to act after a personally thoughtful introspective cost-benefit analysis has persuaded them through analyzing others of their colleagues playing the price for extending themselves in reflection of their mandate, paying the consequences of matters turning awry. Police now look to play it safe in public order and security and still deliver their mandate.

Toronto Police Service: Woman pulled from freezing water.