The NYPD recently unveiled CompStat 2.0 — a new interactive crime map made available online to the public.
This level of crime-mapping prowess is a sign that policing is in a new era, especially when added to the NYPD’s formidable intelligence-gathering capacity, like its powerful Domain Awareness System, which can read and store license plate numbers.
Soon after landing back in the city for another stint as police commissioner, Bill Bratton boasted that the police can track New Yorkers through their phones and GPS systems. However, the ability to forecast crime, like in the film “Minority Report,” is something new altogether. Crime data, mapped out as in the new CompStat system, would be fed to computers whose algorithms could tell police where crime might occur next: predictive policing.
As chief of the Los Angeles Police Department until 2009, Bratton laid the groundwork for a pilot program that used research from some UCLA professors meant to aid the military’s overseas counter-insurgency efforts to predict where crime would occur in American cities.
The methods are controversial. Grants have been doled out by the Department of Justice, but there has been little public discussion on this sort of sci-fi brand of policing. One of the most obvious concerns will be what this might mean for communities of color, which for years have borne the brunt of classic broken-windows or stop-and-frisk policing.
Since crime data based on the racially disproportionate arrest and summons practices of the NYPD are the basis for algorithms that predict where crime will occur, we’ll simply be looking for crime in the same neighborhoods. Sending extra cops to a corner in Brownsville, for example, because a computer calculated there’ll be a robbery or a slashing there next week, could mean more stopping and profiling of residents there — without a crime actually taking place.
Twenty-plus years ago, when Bratton helped devise the first CompStat system, the idea was “putting cops on dots.” Now, in an Orwellian attempt to prevent crime, police will create their own dots. None of this bodes well for poor black and Latino New Yorkers, who are left to marvel at the high-tech abilities of the police.
Josmar Trujillo is a trainer, writer and activist with the Coalition to End Broken Windows.
