Enrico Nardelli <nardelli@mat.uniroma2.it> writes: bellissimo grazie!!! a fini archivistici aggiungo qualche estratto

https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/police-beat-algorithm-lbj-ibm.html

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8--- Excerpted from “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World edited by Torie Bosch. Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. In the early 1960s, the Black civil rights revolution raged in the streets across the United States. This quest to build a more racially just and equitable society happened right alongside the computer revolution. Soon the two fused with the advent of the Police Beat Algorithm, a software system to help police departments collect crime data and determine where to focus crime-fighting efforts—and one that that would end up deeply affecting our society from the 1960s up through the present. Why did the Police Beat Algorithm come to exist? What problems prompted the need for its formulation? Who developed it, and to what ends? The answers to each of these questions collectively tell a story about how a little-known computational experiment laid the cornerstone for what would become today’s surveillance infrastructure—one that has deeply and negatively affected communities of color across the globe. [...] IBM’s focus on problem-solving also dictated its marketing strategy. The company’s marketing representatives didn’t peddle prepackaged products. Rather, they engaged leaders in every major industry—from banking to transportation to the military—and simply asked, “What problem do you have?” Then, they promised to marshal IBM’s research and development strength to build customized solutions for its customers—solutions that could be broadly applied and widely scaled. [...] For the President’s Crime Commission, White America’s vision of the Watts uprisings put a face to the problem the president called on them to solve—a problem that they felt required an extraordinary remedy. They found great potential in the new computing technologies that had already revolutionized war and national defense. Computing held so much promise that in the spring of 1966, following the Watts uprisings, Johnson added the Science and Technology Task Force to the Commission to introduce new computational solutions to crime. The president justified the task force’s work by pointing to computing technology’s success in war, national defense, and space exploration: [...] While the president and the Commission held great hope for the solutions the Science and Technology Task Force would produce, they placed their hopes more specifically in the one man whom they appointed to lead it: Saul I. Gass. Gass was a mathematician and operations research pioneer. In 1958 he wrote the first textbook on linear programming—a mathematical modeling technique that seeks to (in large part) influence human behavior by quantifying and understanding the linear relationships between variables. [...] Gass signaled his agreement with the Johnson administration that policing was the institution best equipped to solve America’s crime problem—and therefore developed—the Police Beat Algorithm. [...] The Police Beat Algorithm predominantly addressed four problems associated with police operations: 1) pattern recognition, identifying crime patterns within a set of crime data; 2) profiling, associating crime patterns with probable suspects; 3) dragnetting, linking probable suspects of one crime with past crimes or arrests; and 4) patrol positioning, how to best place patrols within appropriate geographical divisions of the city based on where the most crimes take place and where known criminal suspect profiles predicted who will most likely commit those crimes and where. --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8--- -- 380° (Giovanni Biscuolo public alter ego) «Noi, incompetenti come siamo, non abbiamo alcun titolo per suggerire alcunché» Disinformation flourishes because many people care deeply about injustice but very few check the facts. Ask me about <https://stallmansupport.org>.