If the purpose of the models is to prevent serious crimes, you might ask why nuisance crimes are tracked at all. The answer is that the link between antisocial behavior and crime has been an article of faith since 1982, when a criminologist named George Kelling teamed up with a public policy expert, James Q.
Wilson, to write a seminal article in the Atlantic Monthly on so-called broken-windows policing.
The idea was that low-level crimes and misdemeanors created an atmosphere of disorder in a neighborhood.
This scared law-abiding citizens away.
The dark and empty streets they left behind were breeding grounds for serious crime.
The antidote was for society to resist the spread of disorder.
This included fixing broken windows, cleaning up graffiti-covered subway cars, and taking steps to discourage nuisance crimes.#2689•
WMDs, by contrast, tend to favor efficiency. By their very nature, they feed on data that can be measured and counted. But fairness is squishy and hard to quantify. It is a concept. And computers, for all of their advances in language and logic, still struggle mightily with concepts. They "understand" beauty only as a word associated with the Grand Canyon, ocean sunsets, and grooming tips in Vogue magazine.
They try in vain to measure "friendship" by counting likes and connections on Facebook.
And the concept of fairness utterly escapes them.
Programmers don't know how to code for it, and few of their bosses ask them to.#2697•
So fairness isn't calculated into WMDs. And the result is massive, industrial production of unfairness. If you think of a WMD as a factory, unfairness is the black stuff belching out of the smoke stacks. It's an emission, a toxic one.#2716•