Vsauce, Kevin here -- and this is you.
Your score is 14, because you’ve been unemployed for 6 months and didn’t finish high school.
Your next door neighbor is 23 because he was arrested on a drug charge a few years back.
Your cousin lives a block away -- he’s in college, so he’s 2.
Your mom’s 1, so is your sister.
And then your best friend gets shot here in a convenience store robbery -- all of a sudden
the police knock on your door to tell you that a complex algorithm has placed you on
a list of citizens at a high risk of being involved in a shooting.
But they also tell you they don’t know whether you’ll be the shooter or the victim.
They claim they know everything about your past.
You’re under surveillance… because your score, which was 14, is now 137.
If that sounds too far-fetched to be true -- ask Robert McDaniel.
Their algorithm predicted his fate perfectly -- or did they actually seal it?
In 2013, Chicago Police showed up uninvited to tell Robert McDaniel that their algorithm
had determined he’d very likely be involved in a shooting.
I was sitting on the couch and they explained to me, like, what was going on.
This is what they’ve been looking for me for.
And they there telling me like I was most likely to get shot or shoot somebody – of
my background.
He was on their “Heat List.”
Each of 22 police precincts came up with 20 names of people most likely to be a party
to crime -- and no one really knew the science of it.
My video about predictive policing detailed the evolving effort to use data to guess where
crimes are most likely to occur, what types of crimes they’ll be, and how to allocate
resources to reduce them.
Chicago’s Strategic Subject List had hundreds of thousands of names -- the “Heat List”
was the names at the very top.
But for Robert McDaniel, it wasn’t about patrolling a neighborhood that had some recent
break-ins.
It was about watching one man on that list.
The problem wasn’t Robert’s criminal history.
He’d been arrested before, but it was for marijuana offenses and gambling with dice.
The problem was his friends.
Chicago received a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice for a program
they called “Two Degrees of Association”: an algorithm determined your level of crime
risk based not just on your own history, but the actions of people you’d been arrested
with.
You care about your friends, but the police care about the hidden algebra of friendships.
Robert had recently lost a friend to gun violence, and he’d been arrested with that friend
in the past for marijuana use.
Robert’s social proximity to a shooting victim meant that his score on the Heat List
was now 215 -- meaning the algorithm determined that he was 215 times more likely than average
to be involved in a shooting.
Some people on the Heat List had scores over 500.
BOOBS.
The director of the Medical Imaging Research Center at the Illinois Institute of Technology
was involved in the algorithm, and he compared predictive crime mapping to identifying anomalies
in mammograms.
Look at the image and see what’s just… not normal.
In an interview with The Verge, designer Miles Wernick said, "It’s not just shooting somebody,
or being shot.
It has to do with the person’s relationships to other violent people."
The algorithm is, again, a black box.
We don’t know any of the details of how it works.
But we do know that it’s based on social network theory -- the police use data about
who you associate with to assess your risk of engaging in crime.
WHAT’S SOCIAL NETWORK THEORY?
Here’s a really specific example.
Let’s say the new guy at work smokes alone during his lunch break.
A former smoker might be influenced to start smoking again and the two of them form a little
smoke break club.
A few other co-workers join in and now they’ve created a smokers social network.
THIS GUY is the catalyst for everyone else changing their behavior and status -- including
the ones who don’t smoke and are now suddenly outsiders.
Now two groups exist, smokers and non-smokers, with varying individual behaviors, when before,
everyone just ate lunch together.
Social influences spread like a virus.
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Okay.
Andrew V. Papachristos and Christopher Wildeman have posited that gun violence works similarly
to the transmission of blood-borne pathogens: it’s an epidemic with patterns that can
be mapped just like cholera or HIV.
They concluded that someone within two degrees of a person involved in a shooting is 100
times more likely than average to be involved in a future shooting.
Using simple proximity as grounds for criminal suspicion sounds a heckuva lot like guilt
by association, RIGHT?
WROo-... ehhh…
It’s complicated.
The history of “joint enterprise” in British Commonwealth law stretches back centuries
to address the rise in pistol dueling.
Spectators were suddenly exposed to criminal liability just as participants were, as their
role in encouraging the act was deemed a threat to public safety.
Is that really fair?
Well, for Robert McDaniel, the spectators pulled the trigger.
When police confronted him, they were accompanied by a social worker who offered to help him
with employment or mental health services to reduce his risk.
That’s really good.
Here’s what was really bad.
Neighbors who saw the encounter suspected Robert of being a police informant, and knowing
he would be under police scrutiny despite not having done anything wrong rightfully
confused and angered him.
The Police trying to warn and aid him ended up harming his social standing in the community.
There’s an old saying that “snitches get stitches.”
Robert got a bullet.
A friend called Robert and asked him to explain why he was on the Heat List, why he was talking
to the police, and why journalists and documentarians were interested in his life.
When he came outside, a car pulled up and shot him.
He didn’t report the shooting to police because he said he’s not a snitch.
But by putting him on their Heat List – he got heat.
A 2016 paper said that Chicago’s Heat List provided “no practical direction about what
to do with individuals [on it], little executive or administrative attention paid to the pilot,
and little to no follow-up with district commanders.”
In 2020, Robert McDaniel was half a block from his home when he was shot a second time
-- which he says is because his neighbors still believe he’s working with police.
His reputation was destroyed for no benefit to anyone.
I just personally would like to wish Miss Wesley the best of luck and hope they can
change something.
If I can do anything to help them, I’ll help them.
But as far as them trying to make me a product of their work?
I don’t too much appreciate that.
High crime rates pushed police to transition from being a reactive force responding to
crimes to a proactive force trying to prevent them.
They grabbed on to the data science of the private sector because it worked in that sphere.
But for law enforcement, the pipeline of responsibility goes like this.
You wanna see the pipeline?
Here’s the pipeline.
A litany of government agencies collect data, which is often flawed, incomplete or biased,
then mathematicians create algorithms using that data, which programmers turn into usable
code, police departments try to apply the output generally across cities, then individual
officers implement results in specific neighborhoods, and then courts interpret the whole chain
of events -- so who’s actually responsible?
Everyone.
And no one.
Chicago ended the Heat List initiative 3 years ago, but the London Metropolitan Police Force
continues to use and refine its own version -- a database that combines personal information
with criminal associations to assign a green, amber, or red designation to indicate a threat
of violence.
They call it “The Matrix.”
Which is totally not ominous at all.
So what choices have YOU made that would put you on the Heat List?
Would any of your friends make you more of a suspect?
Have you STOPPED being friends with someone because of their impact on your social status?
And…
what did that do to their life if you were their only positive influence?
Do you have a moral responsibility to lower the scores of people around you -- even if
you risk raising your own?
And if we can quantify these complex social relationships, do we store the data?
How do we use it?
WHO uses it, and for what?
To get a loan?
To have a social media account?
To hold a job, get married, order a pizza?
Which faceless authorities, each of whom is completely divorced from the innerworkings
of the actual algorithm, are you comfortable permanently etching a number into your identity?
… because once you’re on the list, there’s no way off.
And the number doesn’t care whether you shoot the bullet or take it.
And as always, thanks for watching.
I say just best thing in life for you to do is mind your own business.
Don’t bring problems to yourself that does not need to be in your life.