Posts by Kate Krontiris
Another Offspring of the Marriage Between Crime Data and the iPhone
Published October 14, 2009 @ 05:00PM PT
"Warning: Stay alert. Do not get hurt."
That's what the iPhone said to me, in a very masculine voice, when I tried out the new application "Are You Safe? Sacramento." I had typed in an address recommended to me -- I don't live in Sacramento, otherwise the phone would have used GPS to identify my current location -- and discovered that, in that immediate vicinity, my "personal defcon" threat level was 2 (or orange, which is high). The phone told me that there had been 4 homicides, 27 assaults, 4 robberies, and 19 car thefts in this immediate vicinity in 2008. Additionally, I learned that a car had been stolen "about 0 ft. from here, on 05-22-2008. It occurred at 17:15, according to the record. If you are parking your vehicle you might want to think about finding a garage. You might be able to glean more context by examining the offense description: 10851(A)VC TAKE VEH W/O OWNER."
This, fine readers, is what is available to you if you live in Sacramento, Atlanta, Washington D.C., Milwaukee, or Indianapolis; you own an iPhone; and you are willing to pay $0.99. It is the union of publicly available crime data, GPS mapping, fancy application graphics (behold, the "threat meter"), and the long-standing human obsession with personal safety.
Its uses, according to the application makers, include:
- "Visiting and unfamiliar with the city?"
- "Debating whether to walk or take a cab?"
- "Headed to an area you haven't been to before?"
- "Not sure if you should park your car on the street?"
For outsiders to a neighborhood, it might be a helpful tool (likely, the people who have lived in the neighborhood for a while don't need a "threat meter" to tell them what crimes have been happening in the area recently). And to be fair, there's good reason to have as much data about any place as you can.
I wonder, however, whether there is an element of hysteria at play. If this kind of technology takes root broadly, is it yet another way of stigmatizing neighborhoods that indeed have serious public safety concerns? Will we now think of neighborhoods in terms of their “defcon threat levels,” as if we live in highly-militarized war zone? Finally, how should regular citizens understand the data that they are getting – is 4 homicides a lot? – and what larger context information are they missing to evaluate the significance of this information? Absent good answers on this front, this kind of application seems like an irresponsible way of technologizing “bad neighborhood” stereotypes. This is not a welcome – or helpful – development.
A Nobel Prize in Economics … About Police Departments?
Published October 13, 2009 @ 04:54PM PT
Usually, criminologists don’t pay that much attention to what economists are doing – or vice versa. This week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prize for various disciplines, gave us good reason to reconsider the link between economics and policing.
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to with the Nobel Prize in this category, was recognized for her contributions to the “analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.” What does this mean? Ostrom has successfully demonstrated that commonly-shared property (such as fish stocks, grassland, or groundwater basins) is often better-managed by pools of users than by government structures or private entities. The idea is that local systems of users often develop subtle and refined regulations for usage over time, including practices for monitoring and enforcement that protect the resource, even when the benefits to users are only modest.
What does this have to do with policing?
One of Ostrom’s early projects tested the presiding assumption that police departments centralized at the city level created economies of scale that resulted in more efficient policing. To the contrary, Ostrom’s survey of 80 metropolitan areas found that small, locally-controlled forces are more effective than a large, city-wide controlled police force in meeting citizen demands for neighborhood police protection. As Ostrom noted in a later article, “For patrolling, if you don’t know the neighborhood, you can’t spot the early signs of problems, and if you have five or six layers of supervision, the police chief doesn’t know what’s occurring on the street.” This point was made in 1974, and almost twenty years later, police departments like that of Chicago decentralized their organizations to encourage officers to proactively identify and address sources of crime and disorder in their patrol areas. Community-based policing took root and now much of the federal funding provided by the Department of Justice for local crime issues requires locally-based teams of law enforcement agents and community partners to work together at the neighborhood level. (For more on this, check out the Project Safe Neighborhoods website at the Department of Justice.)
The basic idea is intuitive: that the people who own the resource are more likely to shepherd it wisely – this is as important an insight for crime and public safety as it is for environmentalism!
Fixing the Information Mismatch in Juvenile Justice
Published October 12, 2009 @ 06:53AM PT
In 2007. I met a soft-spoken young man whom we will call “Ivan.” Almost everyday, he wore a large sweatshirt with cats and dogs on it. When I asked him if he liked animals, his face lit up and he told me that his dream was to become a veterinarian. He really loved taking care of animals, he said, and he was especially good with dogs.
I knew Ivan because he was in the Bronx Family Court on a delinquency proceeding for allegedly throwing water on his teacher’s laptop at school. Ivan said it was an accident, although his teacher didn’t think so. While awaiting a finding in his case, Ivan was successfully attending Saturday community service events, he was going to his counseling appointments, and he was present at school when his probation officer checked on him. Unfortunately, Ivan’s mom didn’t quite have her act together, so Ivan would find himself breaking up fights between her and her boyfriend, or taking care of her when she was too high to do it herself. Eventually, the court recognized that Ivan’s mom was not in a position to mother him as required by law. Without other family members or friends to take him in, Ivan was put into a juvenile jail to await the finding in his case.
There are many, many sad elements of this story, but I want to focus on the lack of understanding that Ivan and his mom had about his court proceeding. Indeed, in a recent report recommending improvements to New York City’s alternative-to-detention (ATD) programs, prepared by the Youth Justice Board at the Center for Court Innovation, the youth authors note a key finding: young people and their families often lack sufficient and necessary information to participate meaningfully in juvenile delinquency cases. The board members – who spent more than five months interviewing over 30 policymakers and practitioners, conducting site visits to New York City’s ATD programs, and leading focus groups with system-involved young people – found three important factors in this information gap.
First, the young people surveyed said that they never received a clear explanation of how the juvenile justice system works or how their actions could affect their case outcomes. Second, this confusion about the complicated legal process made young people very cautious about accepting advice on difficult decisions from their lawyers. Without knowing why their lawyers would be talking to judges or other people in the courtroom, the youth suspected that these adults were, in fact, working against them. Likewise, lawyers said that communication barriers – and the difficulty of reaching young people by phone – undermined their ability to properly represent their clients. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, parents and family members had no idea how much impact their actions have on judges’ decisions about whether to release or remand (incarcerate) their children. While judges expect parents to attend all court dates, parents do not know this, nor are they always able to miss work for their children’s court hearings, which can drag on for months. Knowing how much stress they are causing their parents, many youth are hesitant (and feel poorly equipped) to explain their cases to their parents.
The Youth Justice Board has made some simple and excellent suggestions for how to solve this problem: once they have been arrested, young people should be provided with informational materials that diagram what the process will look like, offer tips for best outcomes, explain their rights, and define key terms they will hear. Youth and their families should also have access to somebody – not their lawyer – who can answer all of these questions in person, in court. Additionally, lawyers should use plain language to explain their role and to specify what information they can and cannot share with other court players. And finally, the young people themselves should do their best to show up for their court dates on time and make sure their lawyers have up-to-date information (like a recent school success) that will help their case in court. These are all steps that juvenile justice systems nationwide can implement reasonably and in short order. Fulfilling the promise of justice for young people like Ivan is not something that can wait.
For more information about the Youth Justice Board, you can listen to a podcast with the program coordinator and some of the board members themselves here: http://www.courtinnovation.org/Podcasts/yjb.mp3
Why We Need Criminal Justice 2.0
Published September 07, 2009 @ 08:57AM PT
All sorts of technologies are making life and work easier and more transparent. Criminal justice agencies and organizations have an opportunity to make broad use of interactive tools on the web to ensure public safety and educate the public about issues and programs.
Some time ago, I came across this astounding video demonstrating the Sixth Sense, an amazing new tech tool being pioneered at the MIT Media Lab. (Watch the video after the jump).
I was blown away. This video made me realize that there were people creating cutting-edge technologies that I had never even conceived possible. Since I write a blog for the Upper Manhattan Reentry Task Force, I immediately began wondering how this technology might be useful for people in the process of return from prison to community.
