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One of The most notable examples of the use of forecasting technology is the story of Robert McDaniel, detailed by journalist Matt Stroud in The Verge in May 2021. McDaniel is a resident of Austin, a Chicago neighborhood where 72 murders were committed, almost 10% of the city’s total, in 2020 alone. Despite the fact that McDaniel had no records of violence (he was arrested for selling pots and shooting dice), a 2013 Chicago police forecasting program found that he is a “person of interest” – literally. In the 2011-16 CBS crime drama of this name, the “machine” created by the show’s protagonist can only determine whether or not a person will be a victim or perpetrator of a violent crime. Similarly, the algorithm used by the CPD shows that McDaniel is more likely than 99.9 percent of Chicago’s population to take part in the shooting, although it is not known which side of the weapon he will be.
Equipped with this “knowledge,” Chicago police placed McDaniel on their list of strategic items, later known as the “Heat List,” and watched him closely, even though he was not suspected of involvement in any particular crime. As part of this surveillance was discovered, it suggested to others in his neighborhood that he may have some connection to the police – that he may have been an informant with an extremely damaging reputation.
Predictably enough, McDaniel has been shot twice since he was first identified by the CPD: first in 2017, perhaps in part because of the publicity generated by his appearance in a German documentary the same year, Before the crimethat he hoped to help clear his name; and most recently in 2020, he told Verge that both shootings were due to CPD surveillance itself and the resulting suspicion that he was cooperating with law enforcement. “According to McDaniel,” Stroud writes, “the heat list caused the damage its creators hoped to avoid: it predicted a shooting that would not have happened if it had not foreseen the shooting.”
This is true enough, but here too there is a deeper model that needs to be observed. Due to police data from the past, the McDaniel neighborhood, and therefore the people in it, have been labeled as thugs. Then the program said that the future would be the same – that is, that there would be no future, but just repetitions of the past, more or less identical with it. This is not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, although it is certainly the following: it is a system designed to carry the past into the future and thus prevent world change.
The program that the identified McDaniel appears to have been developed specifically for CPD by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, according to earlier Stroud reports. The CPD program has identified about 400 people most likely to be involved in violent crimes and put them on its hotline. This program launched in 2012 and was discontinued in 2019, as revealed in the same year in a Chicago City Government monitoring report that raised concerns about it, including the accuracy of its findings and its data-sharing policies. other agencies. The customized CPD algorithm is reported to focus on individuals and is likely to resemble a wide range of programs used by law enforcement and the military, of which the public has little knowledge. For example, in 2018, journalist Ali Winston reported in Verge that the monitoring company Palantir, founded by Peter Thiel, had been secretly testing similar technology in New Orleans since 2012, without informing many city authorities.
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