Reality resembles “Minority Report”

In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer “Deep Blue” battled against chess grandmaster and world champion Garry Kasparov in what was touted to be a true duel of man versus machine.

Ultimately, the machine won.

While chess is a complex game, it pales in comparison to the intricacies of crime fighting.

However, 10 years later, it appears IBM has developed technology to overcome even the biggest conundrums of crime prediction.

According to an IBM press release issued last week, Tennessee’s Memphis Police Department augmented its crime fighting techniques using what it called “IBM predictive analytics software.”

The system, known as Criminal Reduction Utilizing Statistical History, or CRUSH, monitors and analyzes previously existing crime reports, offender profiles and intelligence seminars to predict potential crime hot spots in the city.

CRUSH is startlingly complex. It uses data from such obscure sources as local weather reports to analyze where and how crimes-to-be will pop up.

According to The Daily Telegraph, the analytics software reduced serious crime in Memphis by more than 30 percent, including a 15 percent reduction in violent crimes since 2006.

MPD is now able to proactively allocate resources and deploy personnel, resulting in improved force effectiveness and increased public safety.

While I am a huge proponent of enabling our law enforcement agencies to work to their maximum efficiency, I am frankly a little uneasy about the fact that technology reminiscent of the Tom Cruise film “Minority Report” is already in existence, let alone in use.

We live in a nation where we abide by the basic legal premise that a person is innocent until proven guilty. This technology seems to provide an avenue for the circumvention of that principle.

The possibility that the average American citizen can be flagged as a criminal-in-the-making because a computer program has calculated that they display “criminal-like” tendencies is frightening.

The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice uses predictive analytics to predict which prisoners due for release are most likely to commit crimes based on their living accommodations, level of education, relationships, financial management, lifestyle, friends, emotional well-being and attitude.

While improved police resource allocation is a legitimate benefit of the software, I firmly believe the possibility of a false positive resulting from the use of this technology is grounds for reconsideration — especially if it results from one’s choice of friends.

“According to (IBM’s Head of Government Strategy Mark) Cleverley, the company is now refining the system to enable it to sample data from an even wider range of sources and process the results faster,” The Guardian reported.

“At some point in the future we hope to include analysis of feeds from CCTV (closed-circuit television) cameras and public sources from the Internet, such as Facebook posts,” said Cleverley.

This software represents the growing presence of the government in our everyday lives through technological advances. While CRUSH might seem innocuous now, only time will tell how beneficial it will eventually be.

IBM has been involved in ostensibly society-improving technology development in the past. In the 1930s, IBM shipped hundreds of punch-card machines to Germany to conduct a highly advanced census.

I assume everyone knows what that seemingly typical census resulted in.


E-mail: halderfe@indiana.edu