Earlier a friend emailed me a link to a lovely headline about so-called precognitive policing — “Police Program Aims to Pinpoint Those Most Likely to Commit Crimes“:
Mr. Brown, whose criminal record includes drug and assault charges, is at the center of an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey. The goal is to do all they can to prevent the crime from happening.
The strategy, known as predictive policing, combines elements of traditional policing, like increased attention to crime “hot spots” and close monitoring of recent parolees. But it often also uses other data, including information about friendships, social media activity and drug use, to identify “hot people” and aid the authorities in forecasting crime.
Many people would say, “Fine! At last, a way to stop criminals before they commit crimes.”
But what is crime?
Tha answer, increasingly, is “Everything”:
“The Criminalization of Almost Everything“:
An average, busy professional gets up in the morning, gets the kids to school, goes to work, uses the telephone or e-mail, has meetings, works on a prospectus or bank loan, goes home, puts the kids to bed, has dinner, reads the newspaper, goes to sleep, and has no idea that, in the course of that day, he or she has very likely committed three felonies. Three felonies that some ambitious, creative prosecutor can pick out from that day’s activities and put into an indictment.
In his foreword to my book, Alan Dershowitz discusses his time litigating cases in the old Soviet Union. He was always taken by the fact that they could prosecute anybody they wanted because some of the statutes were so vague. Dershowitz points out that this was a technique developed by Beria, the infamous sidekick of Stalin, who said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” That really is something that has survived the Soviet Union and has arrived in the good old USA. “Show me the man,” says any federal prosecutor, “and I can show you the crime.” This is not an exaggeration.
Unfortunately, it is not. In the name of the war on drugs, the Fourth Amendment has been systematically shredded for decades. Prosecutors and police have for years been able to do pretty much whatever they wanted, and after 9/11 the piecemeal bleeding of constitutional freedoms became a legally sanctioned hemorrhage. There is no longer financial privacy, medical privacy, nor online privacy.
Citizens are sitting ducks.
While the Constitution wasn’t supposed to be a joke, if you talk about it in a serious manner, you will be laughed at. Trust me. I’ve tried.
UPDATE: Many thanks to Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit for the link! Welcome all!
Comments
10 responses to “Beria would be envious”
rand paul is barely above 1%. republicans are suspicious of you and you don’t like the democratics party’s philosophy. the libertarian party is a joke. and only do good when they siphon away votes. in cave man times when you killed someone if they didn’t put you to death they would send you out of the cave and tell you not to come back telling you you are now a libertarian! freedom is an illusion b.f.skinner. if pro life bob casey can run and win as a democrat maybe a libertarian could too! I know as I am a libertarian democrat.
weeper of the house gone. david duke without the baggae or sheet scalise may be next speaker and shut down the government. when the checks don’t come american people will demand obama come up with final solution to tea bagger question!
Captain, you are not the answer. You don’t even understand the question.
In modern times the executive branch sics the IRS on a cancer patient and his insurance broker for having the gall to question the efficacy of a new government insurance scheme. Or the Federal Election Commission sics the FBI on your mother, asking her where she got the $2K she contributed to your run for congress. And before two federal courts ruled in your favor, that FEC lawyer by the name of Lerner offers you a deal: Promise me you will never run for office again, and we’ll drop this case.
What was that about teabaggers again, Cap’n?
Off topic, but I am beginning to be concerned, is M. Simon well?
[…] MINORITY REPORT: Beria would be envious. […]
Iy’s pretty obvious that the writers of Person of Interest have gotten this concept down to a T.
I don’t know if the NY Times article mentioned that this idea goes back at least to 2010. It was tried in Chicago in 2011, but it didn’t have any noticeable effect on crime.
http://secondcitycop.blogspot.com.tr/2011/01/look-into-my-crystal-balls.html
Murder and attempted murder and rape and armed robbery are crimes regardless, and these predictive techniques work for them. It’s not stupid to focus on people who are habitual criminals (including those who provoke other criminals to attack them).
Overcriminalization is an entirely different issue from noting that So-and-so Peebles is very likely to take a potshot at any Gangsta Overlords he sees, and that the GOs are likely to come looking for him first (“And not with an opera glass, either”, as Mark Twain wrote of a notably violent subculture).
Rich, what worries me is what they call “mission creep.” Like murder, terrorism is also awful, so we went along with new laws granting new, enlarged powers to a new bureaucratic complex. Which wasted no time in using the new system to go after gamblers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and copyright violators.