IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019 - 47

The practical use of the SSL list and scores was
somewhat haphazard in its early years.13 While there
was no official policy regarding its use, it did feature in
some CompStat reports [40], and was used by police
officers in some more controversial ways. The first of
these, called "custom notification," involved police officers making personal visits to high-risk individuals,
informing them of their presence on the list, and further, informing them that they would be subjected to
additional police scrutiny [41]. In other words, they were
told that the police were "watching them" more carefully, and they should expect more police encounters. The
other, and more common use of the SSL was as a "heat
list" following a violent crime, in order to round-up the
"usual suspects" from the list for questioning, in this
case people in the vicinity of the crime who had high
scores on the list. As a result, people on the list were far
more likely to be detained and arrested by police, simply for being on the list. A detailed RAND study showed
that the use of heat list in this way had no statistical
impact on the likelihood of individuals on the list being
involved in gun violence, nor on the overall gun violence
in their communities [42]. It did, however, radically
increase the likelihood of being arrested and convicted
of a crime for those people on the list.
Further, the data and algorithm behind the SSL was
not shared publicly, making it difficult to determine
whether the list simply replicated long-standing racial
and class discrimination. The CPD told the Chicago Tribune that,
"[The SSL] is not based on race, ethnicity or
geographic location..We don't use it to target
certain individuals other than we pay a visit to
their residence to offer them services to get out
of the (gang)."
But a California-based group that defends civil liberties in the digital world raised concern that the arrest
data that goes into the SSL could be inherently biased
against African-American and other minorities:
"Until they show us the algorithm and the exhaustive factors of what goes into the algorithm, the
public should be concerned about whether
the program further replicates racial disparities in
the criminal justice system,"
said Adam Schwartz, a staff attorney for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation [41].

The Ethics of Care approach might
instead consider factors that lead
people to violate the law, and seek
out new interventions that make
crimes less likely.
That same Chicago Tribune article indicates that
85% of the 2100 shooting victims so far that year had
been on the SSL, but does not indicate how they scored
or whether they were all in the list of 1400 high-risk individuals, or the longer list of 398 000 individuals included in the dataset.
Both of the main applications of the SSL, the "custom
notification" warnings and using the "heat list" to bring
people in for questioning, contain elements of precrime.
In the warnings, there is a sense in which the police still
cannot arrest an individual before a crime, but they do
attempt to intimidate and threaten an individual who, in
the majority of cases, has never been arrested for a violent crime. While the police do offer to "help individuals
to leave gangs," it is not clear what specific services they
offered, or whether those services are effective in either
helping individuals get out of gangs or in avoiding future
violence. Similarly, rounding up people in the area who
appear on the "heat list" may be an expedient tool, but it
is no substitute for doing the policework of a real investigation, or following leads from witnesses and suspects.
Indeed, it may impede or undermine community-oriented policing strategies. While police may complain that
witnesses, and even victims, are often unwilling to cooperate with police, these heavy-handed tactics of rounding
up suspects based on data-driven lists only further
breaks down trust between communities and the police.
As such, these uses of SSL actually work against confidence-building efforts by police, while offering little or no
demonstrative positive results [42], [43].
Both applications also appear to engage in victimblaming. In some cases literally so, insofar as the SSL
combines victims and perpetrators in a single category of
"being a party to violence" or at-risk of being "involved
in violence." It makes little sense to show up at someone's door to tell them that they may be the victims of
violence,14 and less sense to threaten them with
14

13

It is also worth noting that the SSL, and the data and algorithms upon
which it was based, was kept private by the CPD. It was only after a long
legal battle that the Chicago Sun-Times newspaper was able to force the
CPD to make the SSL and its data public [39].

JUNE 2019

∕

Making someone aware of a specific threat against them would be helpful,
but people are usually aware of the fact that they live in a violent neighborhood. Nonspecific warnings are of little help, as has been seen with colorcoded threat risks from the Department of Homeland Security, which do not
specify any particular location or type of activity to be on the lookout for.

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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019

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