Chicago’s predictive policing tool just failed a major test | The Verge

"A RAND report shows that the ‘Strategic Subject List’ doesn’t reduce homicides



Struggling to reduce its high murder rate, the city of Chicago has become an incubator for experimental policing techniques. Community policing, stop and frisk, "interruption" tactics — the city has tried many strategies. Perhaps most controversial and promising has been the city’s futuristic "heat list" — an algorithm-generated list identifying people most likely to be involved in a shooting.



The hope was that the list would allow police to provide social services to people in danger, while also preventing likely shooters from picking up a gun. But a new report from the RAND Corporation shows nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, it indicates that the list is, at best, not even as effective as a most wanted list. At worst, it unnecessarily targets people for police attention, creating a new form of profiling.



Funded through a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice, the list’s algorithm identifies people by looking not only at arrests, but also whether someone is socially connected with a known shooter or shooting victim. The program also has a kind of pre-crime feature in which police visit people on the list before any crime has been committed.



One of the list’s most promising aspects was that it wasn’t just a police officer who would visit. Social workers would show up, too — employees of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group at John Jay College. The list was designed to let Chicago police engage with at-risk (and potentially dangerous) citizens, but also to provide social services, such as access to counseling, to people who were in danger.



"We want to show them the carrot and the stick," said Christopher Mallette, executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group, in a conversation with The Verge last year. "We want them to know they can get help — but we also want them to know that if they don’t keep in line, there’s a jail cell waiting for them."



CPD wasn’t shy about touting the importance of the list, later rebranded as the Strategic Subjects List, or SSL. In 2014, the CPD official in charge of the program, Commander Jonathan Lewin, told The Verge: "This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives."



But the study from RAND, which was granted extraordinary access to CPD when it launched the list in 2013, found that the program has saved no lives at all. The RAND researchers were allowed to view the list, sit in on internal meetings, and generally observe how the tool was being used. They discovered that CPD wasn’t using the list as a way to provide social services; instead, CPD was using it as a way to target people for arrest."



Chicago’s predictive policing tool just failed a major test | The Verge