> To the extent you consider pretrial decision risk assessment software to be "predictive policing" (after all, it's predicting which defendants will skip their court date or commit a crime on bail), then there's plenty of evidence that we have good ones.
I think this is a fundamentally different ballgame than predicting where and when crimes will occur with the intent to prioritize police presence, but I do take your point that simple models can outperform human decision making in these cases. What's absolute classification error of these models?
> Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
Not really disputing this, my point is "Need to Steal to Eat" - "Certainty of Punishment" = "Decision to Commit Crime". I don't really understand why "Certainy of Punishment" would be expected to impact "Need to Steal to Eat", but I'm not surprised that the empirical studies you refer to didn't find a relationship there. Would you be able to provide a reference on this one?
> As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response.
Not sure the extent to which the results of this are generalizable. The proper counterfactual here is not "crime-rates pre-pandemic" it's "crime rates post-pandemic in a world where we didn't provide anti-poverty measures". The former is a very poor proxy for the latter, IMO. I wonder if anyone has compared across states or countries with different pandemic responses?
> my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught
Yes it had a very well-funded police department who did very little day-to-day. I can say with certainty that they were very bad at tracking down the local drug dealers as our drug trade was positively thriving. Possibly they would be more motivated to catch petty thieves, but this wasn't really tested while I was there. The occasional bit of vandalism or other hooliganry did not typically get punished, as I recall.
I think this is a fundamentally different ballgame than predicting where and when crimes will occur with the intent to prioritize police presence, but I do take your point that simple models can outperform human decision making in these cases. What's absolute classification error of these models?
> Empirical measures of criminal decision making suggests certainty of punishment is highly explanatory. It does not change whether they think they need to steal to eat.
Not really disputing this, my point is "Need to Steal to Eat" - "Certainty of Punishment" = "Decision to Commit Crime". I don't really understand why "Certainy of Punishment" would be expected to impact "Need to Steal to Eat", but I'm not surprised that the empirical studies you refer to didn't find a relationship there. Would you be able to provide a reference on this one?
> As a natural experiment: the USA engaged in historic poverty-reduction measures in its pandemic response.
Not sure the extent to which the results of this are generalizable. The proper counterfactual here is not "crime-rates pre-pandemic" it's "crime rates post-pandemic in a world where we didn't provide anti-poverty measures". The former is a very poor proxy for the latter, IMO. I wonder if anyone has compared across states or countries with different pandemic responses?
> my guess is your safe childhood town was over policed and it’s quite likely petty thieves would be caught
Yes it had a very well-funded police department who did very little day-to-day. I can say with certainty that they were very bad at tracking down the local drug dealers as our drug trade was positively thriving. Possibly they would be more motivated to catch petty thieves, but this wasn't really tested while I was there. The occasional bit of vandalism or other hooliganry did not typically get punished, as I recall.