LAPD's Failed Predictive Policing Program The Latest COVID-19 Victim
Fucking predictive policing/how the fuck does it work. Mostly, it doesn't. For the most part, predictive policing relies on garbage data generated by garbage cops, turning years of biased policing into "actionable intel" by laundering it through a bunch of proprietary algorithms.
More than half a decade ago, early-ish adopters were expressing skepticism about the tech's ability to suss out the next crime wave. For millions of dollars less, average cops could have pointed out hot crime spots on a map based on where they'd made arrests, while still coming nothing close to the reasonable suspicion needed to declare nearly everyone in a high crime area a criminal suspect.
The Los Angeles Police Department's history with the tech seems to indicate it should have dumped it years ago. The department has been using some form of the tech since 2007, but all it seems to be able to do is waste limited law enforcement resources to violate the rights of Los Angeles residents. The only explanations for the LAPD's continued use of this failed experiment are the sunk cost fallacy and its occasional use as a scapegoat for the department's biased policing.
Predictive policing is finally dead in Los Angeles. Activists didn't kill it. Neither did the LAPD's oversight. Logic did not finally prevail. For lack of a better phrase, it took an act of God {please see paragraph 97(b).2 for coverage limits} to kill a program that has produced little more than community distrust and civil rights lawsuits. Caroline Haskins has more details at BuzzFeed.
An LAPD memo dated April 15 quoted Police Chief Michel R. Moore saying that the police department would stop using the software, effective immediately, not because of concerns that activists have raised but because of financial constraints due to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.
"The city's financial crisis, coupled with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in the immediate freeze of new contractual agreements and 'belt-tightening' instructions by the Mayor to all city departments for all further expenditures," the memo said. "Therefore, the Department will immediately discontinue the use of PredPol and its associated reports."
Activists like Hamid Khan of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition are calling this a win. And it is, sort of. When something you want stopped stops, it's still a victory, even if it appears to be due to unforeseeable developments rather than local activism. This doesn't mean Khan and others shouldn't keep working to keep LAPD's predpol system shut down. But it's perhaps too optimistic to declare this turn of events as a testament to your activism when it appears the LAPD is only temporarily mothballing a program its budget can't support at the moment.
But we can still hold out hope it won't be resurrected when the current crisis passes. The LAPD has struggled to show the program actually impacts criminal activity more than it does Constitutional rights, despite having more than a decade to do so. We can still celebrate its death, even if it's only being buried in effigy at this point. Maybe by the time this has all passed, the LAPD will realize it hasn't missed the expensive software's dubious contribution to the city's safety and abandon it for good.