Law enforcement, especially, has doubled down on crime statistics in what is now the era of big data, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics. Old ideas, yet again, have been programmed into the latest technology.
At the 2015 New York Times Cities for Tomorrow conference on the newest advances in technology and data analytics for everything from urban-based environmental sustainability to crime control, then Police Commissioner William J. Bratton spoke about the New York Police Department’s latest crime-fighting tool. I sat in the audience anxious to hear him speak. With a broad smile and supreme confidence, he praised the newest release of the pioneering crime mapping software known as CompStat, which had been at the heart of stop and frisk policing when it began a generation ago. He likened the latest version to the 2002 film Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise as head of a special precrime unit. Set in Washington, D.C., in the year 2054, officers gathered intelligence from a trio of precogs, humanlike beings who can predict murders and identify killers before they act. Bratton was almost giddy about the comparison; the unintended pun on the film’s title seemed to escape him.
Two years later at a 2017 Heritage Foundation summit on “Policing in America: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future,” Bratton gave more details about the architecture of CompStat 2.0. The software is based on algorithms and “advanced data mining techniques, we call ‘predictive policing,’” he said. “Effectively, it’s the CompStat of the ‘90s on steroids in the 21st century.” And just like all new technology promises, it was guaranteed to be better than before. “It is discriminating, not discriminatory,” he bragged. “It is precise, not prejudiced.”
Until he retired, Bratton was known as America’s Top Cop. Starting his career as a military police officer in Vietnam and then onto Boston in the 1970s, he spent the next five decades running the biggest and most racially troubled police agencies in the country. Bratton served in six departments coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles and back to the Big Apple. Several of these departments were subject to federal investigations for police brutality either before or after he left. Over the years, he developed a strong personal sense of history, covering the entire span of the post–civil rights era in policing.
But unlike the many critics of aggressive policing tactics, Bratton has rarely, if ever, publicly questioned the value of social science data, except when the research critiqued police racism…
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