SSL Fails

The "Heat List" doesn't prevent murder?

• Struggling to reduce its high murder rate, the city of Chicago has become an incubator for experimental policing techniques. Community policing, stop and frisk, "interruption" tactics — the city has tried many strategies. Perhaps most controversial and promising has been the city’s futuristic "heat list" — an algorithm-generated list identifying people most likely to be involved in a shooting.
  
  The hope was that the list would allow police to provide social services to people in danger, while also preventing likely shooters from picking up a gun. But a new report from the RAND Corporation shows nothing of the sort has happened. Instead, it indicates that the list is, at best, not even as effective as a most wanted list. At worst, it unnecessarily targets people for police attention, creating a new form of profiling.

Profiling?! Profiling??? We can't have that!

In the defense of the eggheads, we don't think the "heat list" was intended to prevent murders. But it was twisted to that end. It was nothing a dedicated and intelligent officer didn't do back in the day - know the players, know the game. Some of the best coppers we knew had networks of snitches, knew who was due for a violation, and kept track of the bangers so closely, they knew when someone's grandma was in the hospital - and they made sure they asked after her, too.

Then the gangs fractured. The old order went to jail and the young kids started running out of control. The city disbanded the gang unit and it got too complicated for single specialists to keep track of twenty different splinter groups. This "heat list" is just the natural outgrowth of trying to do more with less and calling it "efficiency."

It might have been efficient, too - if they left it alone. But they didn't.

• CPD wasn’t shy about touting the importance of the list, later rebranded as the Strategic Subjects List, or SSL. In 2014, the CPD official in charge of the program, Commander Jonathan Lewin, told The Verge: "This will inform police departments around the country and around the world on how best to utilize predictive policing to solve problems. This is about saving lives."
  
  But the study from RAND, which was granted extraordinary access to CPD when it launched the list in 2013, found that the program has saved no lives at all. The RAND researchers were allowed to view the list, sit in on internal meetings, and generally observe how the tool was being used. They discovered that CPD wasn’t using the list as a way to provide social services; instead, CPD was using it as a way to target people for arrest.
  
  "The individuals on the SSL were considered to be ‘persons of interest’ to the CPD," according to the report. "Overall ...there was no practical direction about what to do with individuals on the SSL, little executive or administrative attention paid to the pilot, and little to no follow-up with district commanders."

How many people got promoted exploiting this "heat list"? More than a few.