British Police Built a Sprawling Crime-Prediction Machine. Some Results Couldn’t Be Trusted
Yet again! This keeps happening!
This system built by Avon and Somerset Police turns out to have terrible results, mostly built around signals that are proxies for poverty:
“Most of these models produce low precision scores, meaning a high proportion of the individuals they flag as risks are incorrectly identified,” the data review found. A model used to help predict burglars appeared to operate with a precision rating lower than 10 percent for more than three years, according to the police data. According to Eticas, that meant fewer than one in 10 flagged as high risk would actually offend. Other concerns included performance metrics for various models shifting sharply. “This is not typical of well-governed models in operational use,” the audit observed.
One "burglary offender" risk model dropped to 60% recall and a truly astonishingly bad 10% precision! That's honestly quite impressive -- normally you really have to work at building a model with such shitty precision numbers.
Tags: transparency models analytics police crime ai algorithms predictive-policing policing data-protection poverty
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A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months
"fus__ro_dah" != "fus_ro_dah":
One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months.
Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name “fus__ro_dah” (two underscores after “fus”), but they accidentally requested records for the username “fus_ro_dah” (one underscore after “fus”). This one-character difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme. [...]
Despite finding no evidence of the crime on his digital devices, Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child sex abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced in 2024 to 18 months in prison. He served the full term.
Amazing that this was never checked until the innocent man discovered it himself, wile preparing his appeal, after release.
Tags: police law-enforcement law usernames miscarriage-of-justice justice evidence nova-scotia