Skip to main content

Chicago hasn’t yet found an effective tech tool for cutting murder rate

chicago strategic subject list homicide reduction fail pd head
Henryk Sadura/123RF
Predictive policing isn’t working in the Windy City. The Chicago Police Department’s Strategic Subject List is an algorithm-driven intervention tool intended to head off crime and reduce the number of homicides, but studies so far show no progress, according to The Verge.

Chicago is an incubator for new policing techniques, The Verge reports. For years the city has run experimental programs, trying to find the right solution or mix of solutions to reduce violent crime and cut the homicide rate.

In 2013, The CPD received a $2 million grant from the National Institute of Justice for a new type of crime prevention. Originally called the “heat list” but later renamed the Strategic Subject List (SSL), the program uses algorithms to identify people likely to become involved in a shooting. The program was “created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology,” the Verge reported in 2014.

In addition to using arrest records, the program also added people socially connected to known shooters and shooting victims. In addition to just making a list, another part of the program was intervention, sending police officers with social workers from the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group at John Jay College.

The thinking behind the intervention strategy was to have both law enforcement and people who could provide social services engage with people on the list.

“We want to show them the carrot and the stick,” said Christopher Mallette, executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group. “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.”

At the time critics said it could just end up as another form of profiling.

A recently released Rand Corporation study (subscription required) showed that people on the list were not more or less likely to be victims — of shooting or a homicide — than a control group, but they were most likely to be arrested for a shooting. So in the end, it didn’t identify victims and it didn’t deter shooters.

The Rand report authors told The Verge that the SSL wasn’t being used as originally intended and that with up to 11 different programs going on in the CPD when the SSL was started, it “just got lost.”

The Chicago Police Department responded to the Rand report in a press release. The CPD said the study focused on an earlier version of the SSL, that “the prediction model discussed in the report is the very early, initial model (Version 1), developed in August 2012. We are now using Version 5, which is significantly improved.”

The CPD also said of the current version of the SSL, “which has since evolved greatly and has been fully integrated with the department’s management accountability process.”

Predictive policing expert and law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, Andrew G. Ferguson wrote in an email to The Verge, “Just creating a data-driven ‘most-wanted’ list misses the value of big data prediction. The ability to identify and proactively intervene in the lives of at-risk youth is a positive, but you have to commit to the intervention piece. Just directing police toward those individuals for traditional policing is not enough.”

Bruce Brown
Digital Trends Contributing Editor Bruce Brown is a member of the Smart Homes and Commerce teams. Bruce uses smart devices…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more