The Chicago Police Department is using predictive analytics in an unusual and controversial way — to write the city's own hit list, in the hopes it can be used to intervene before violence occurs.
Dubbed the "Strategic Subject List," the list is an ordered index of roughly 1,400 Chicagoans who the police department considers responsible for much of the city's gun violence, according to The New York Times. The computer algorithm, which is on its fourth iteration, was created by Miles Wernick, PhD, a professor of engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, according to the report. It generates a list of individuals police can view on a dashboard based on 10 confidential variables police say are tied to past interactions with law enforcement, such as arrests, convictions or gang affiliations. It is not unlike many hotspotting techniques used by hospitals to identify and intervene with their highest utilizers, according to the report.
Dr. Wernick told The New York Times the program is deliberate about not using discriminatory variables like race, ethnicity, gender or geography in creating the list. Yet critics are still concerned with the ethics behind the Strategic Subject List — whether it is fair, legal or even valuable, according to the report.
Police say more than 70 percent of those shot in the city so far this year have been on the list, and 117 of 140 people arrested last week in one of the city's largest-ever gang raids were also on the list, according to the report. But the other issue is whether the list is even effective in curbing gun violence; the city has already seen 1,285 shooting victims at the time of this writing, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Police have been using the list to make home visits to those at highest risk of involvement in a shooting, according to The New York Times. In the visits, the police tell the person they are on the list and offer them resources for drug treatment, housing and job training, according to the report.
About one in five people end up taking up the offer for assistance and less than one in ten have been shot after a home visit from the police, said Christopher Mallette, executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy, a group that helps lead the effort, according to The New York Times. The method is still a work in progress, but police said they are upping home visits this year, according to the report.
Read the full story on the Strategic Subject List here.
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