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Building software to identify trends in unsolved murders

87 points| adventured | 9 years ago |bloomberg.com | reply

20 comments

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[+] e28eta|9 years ago|reply
Does anyone know why MAP focuses on the clearance rate? It seems to conflate arresting someone with "solving" the murder.

I can think of some plausible reasons: practicality (easiest to collect, stable over time), political (if your audience is the police, basing your work on the assumption that they arrest the right guy is probably smart), standardization (is it?), etc.

Wikipedia is fairly light, but does link to a pair of articles on the criminal justice conflict vs consensus models, so it seems this is a potential can of worms.

[+] dsfyu404ed|9 years ago|reply
I'm really not moved by the "resources" argument all the PDs are giving.

Investigating murders is the kind of thing you do when you've run out of meth labs to bust and black guys to beat. It's a high effort, low reward task. Of course they'd much rather cut back there than not buy everyone tazers.

[+] masscontrol|9 years ago|reply
The article title "Serial Killers Should Fear This Algorithm" is naive since psychopaths do not feel emotions like fear or empathy, or at least not spontaneously.[1]

I've tried to test a psychopath in the wild using a word association psychoanalysis method[2], but they are hard to find. Hospitals would not divulge names (no surprise there) and many psychopaths are senior corporate professionals who run successful companies.[3]

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-empathic-brain/2013...

[2] https://criticalstimulus.com/

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/13/1-in-5-ceos-are-p...

[+] mattkrause|9 years ago|reply
If we're going to be pedantic, even psychopathic serial killers should fear it, even if they don't....

Anyway, hospitals certainly won't divulge patient lists to random folks off the street. However, if you're a researcher, there are definitely procedures for getting access to all kinds of patients and patient data. It certainly helps to have a relevant affiliation, if only for guidance and help with the paperwork, but if you really want to try this, I'm sure there's a way to make it happen.

[+] purple-again|9 years ago|reply
Your assertion that you have to be a psychopath to be a serial killer is unsupported. The unabomber was as capable of fear as the rest of us.
[+] LordKano|9 years ago|reply
Even one who is incapable of feeling fear probably should fear the means by which he could be caught.
[+] sandworm101|9 years ago|reply
They dont meen the emotion of fear. They mean the logic of avoiding something to promote your interests. Psychopaths might not feel fear, but they tend to jump out of the way of busses anyway. Fearing death is separate from not wanting to die. But a third party would say that the psycopath does fear the bus in that he still avoids it, an identical behavior to those who are truly afraid.
[+] eptcyka|9 years ago|reply
And regular readers should fear this headline.
[+] dang|9 years ago|reply
We've replaced it with a phrase from the subtitle.
[+] ffef|9 years ago|reply
Keyword: Before the fact
[+] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
cynical me thinks it simply isn't profitable to them to solve murder cases unless public outcry is very high and more profitable to beat on the fear of drugs and perform seizures.

post 2010 drop could unfortunately be attributed to a hostile media and Presidency towards the police because of some overly politicized cases

[+] mcphage|9 years ago|reply
Definitely there's been a reduction in trust between police departments & citizens, but I'm not sure I agree with you whose fault it is.
[+] adventured|9 years ago|reply
The primary outlier in the clearing stats, is for murders involving black men. As noted in the article, for white women it's near 90%, for white men and black women it's about 76% (comparable to Canada). For black men it's 58%. The question then is, is that due to the volume of murders vs resources (black male murders overwhelmingly take place in poor locations in the inner cities, often are heavily concentrated (eg specific parts of Chicago that have murder rates comparable to the worst areas in Latin America), where police departments are stretched on resources compared to the murder rates), or is it because of who is being murdered (a bias in some regard)?