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The devil is in the details Police look to predict crime by analyzing trends, data
BY KATHLEEN MOORE Gazette Reporter

    A car crash, a code violation or even a weather forecast could soon help police stop a crime wave.
    Police in Schenectady are tracking car crashes to help fi nd criminals, while Albany is using the weather to predict when crime will occur. A regional effort with Troy may help them all add code violations to the mix as they try to figure out how to stop crime before it happens.
    By tracking car accidents last fall, Schenectady police pinpointed patrols in the Mont Pleasant neighborhood and saw certain crimes plummet by 12 percent in the last quarter of 2012. They are using the same system to respond proactively to crime throughout the city, in hopes of getting similar results everywhere.
    Maps of crashes, drunken-driving arrests and other traffi c violations are overlaid with maps of crime reports. Police patrols are sent to the hotspots — locations where traffi c problems and crime are high.
    “What we know is, the driver that’s risky enough to drive drunk ... is often risky enough to take other risks,” said federal Highway Safety Specialist Shannon Purdy. “A lot of criminals are caught at seatbelt checks.”
    Federal officials created the program, D-DACTS (Data-Driven Approaches to Crime and Traffi c Safety), after noticing spikes in crime and traffic violations often happened in the same places.
    Purdy said they theorized that car crashes might be the fi rst statistical notice that a neighborhood is going downhill. When drivers see signs of a bad neighborhood — broken windows, graffiti, litter — they might respond in kind.
    “You’re going to be more likely to disregard safety laws,” she said. “People feel they can get away with it.”
    Police quickly hear of crashes — sometimes more quickly than they hear of criminals moving into the area. But, Purdy said, the same things that encourage speeding also encourage criminals to move in.
    “Those neighborhoods are pretty ripe for criminal activity,” she said.
STOP AND LOOK
    Police can’t simply stop every person who strolls down the street in a high-crime neighborhood, searching for drugs or guns. But they can stop those who pause without coming to a full stop at a stop sign, or run a red light.
    “Then you use a little investigation,” Purdy said. “You might see the guns on the back seat.”
    In other words, traffic safety is a legal way for police to search for criminals who live in the neighborhood.
    Once crime goes down in an area, Purdy said, police don’t get to celebrate. Instead, they need to mobilize the community to clean up the neighborhood — making it less inviting to lawbreakers.
    “So that they’re not just gone for three months,” she said.
    At the same time, police have to turn to their maps again in search of the next hotspot.
    “You have to provide that relentless follow-up. It’s got to be continuously monitored,” she said. “When you move the bad guys out of a neighborhood, they’re going to look for a new place to do their job.”
    She said statistics show that forcing criminals to move cuts down on overall crime a little.
    “It never returns to its previous intensity,” she said, “because people are lazy.”
    The federal program doesn’t come with any grant funding, “but we’re hoping to save money” by helping police focus their efforts, Purdy said.
    The program also gets lots of police into high-crime areas, which she said would be a strong deterrent.
    “It’s high-visibility traffi c enforcement,” she said. “If criminals see a whole lot of lights fl ashing on the side of the road, they’re probably not going to do their business there.”
    In Mont Pleasant, residents have noticed. Traffic enforcement has been so heavy that some complain they can’t run a light without being stopped.
    “I know some people, they’re a little annoyed because they’re picking on little things,” said resident Flora Ramonowski. “I like it.”
    But so far, she said, she still sees criminals on the street.
    Mont Pleasant Neighborhood Association President Mohammed Hafez said he’s pleased by the decrease in crime statistics — but the numbers are still too high.
    “The numbers are showing a little bit of reduction,” he said. “But assault is up. We’ve seen incidents on Crane Street at times. We are concerned with the business area.
    “We want to revive Crane Street. Assaults, we’re concerned with that category. Any crime is a serious issue.”
    More security cameras were installed last fall, as well, which some neighbors hailed as a victory. But Hafez isn’t so sure. The cameras are used to fi nd criminals after the fact, not to stop them in the act.
    “If something happens, it’s very good for it to be resolved, but the cameras won’t prevent the crime from happening,” he said.
HOTSPOT MAPS
    He thinks the answer is more police. That is essentially what has been happening for the last few months — there has been a sizeable increase in police as patrols are sent to focus on the hotspots.
    New Police Chief Brian Kilcullen hopes to reduce serious crimes throughout the city by 10 percent, partly through the new hotspots mapping program.
    Mayor Gary McCarthy wants to take it further by adding code violation data to the mix. He’s working with the Center for Technology in Government at the University at Albany, which could build a software platform to allow city departments to share information easily.
    For the crime mapping, code violations could help pinpoint exactly where neighborhoods are beginning to look inviting to criminals. For fi refighters, pulling up a code report could prepare them for what they will encounter when they run into a burning building. County social workers could use the same data to verify whether a house is safe enough for a child to live there.
    “There’s lots of people who need this code enforcement data,” said Meghan Cook, project manager.
    CTG wants to write a program that could be used by every agency and department in Albany, Schenectady and Troy and their respective counties. It’s an ambitious goal that would take about two years of work and $2 million. So far, the project hasn’t won any grants, but McCarthy said he believes it will be funded soon. The program is just so unusual that it doesn’t fi t any of the normal categories for state grants.
    CTG is applying for other grants that may fit the project better.
    Creating the overlay map with the crime and traffi c data is defi - nitely doable, Cook said, if the project gets funded. She said a prototype could be created quickly while engineers buckled down to the detailed work of sharing code violations across county lines.
    Using unlikely data — such as code violations or traffi c accidents — to predict crime is the new trend in policing. Not everyone is using the program that Schenectady has, but most police departments are analyzing data now.
FELONY WEATHER
    In Albany, analysts consider the weather along with their typical crime trends and maps.
    “We really focus on behaviors,” Chief Steve Krokoff said. “We know that when we have a cold spell and we have a sudden warm up, we usually see a sudden increase in crime, street-related crime: robberies, assaults.”
    So weather forecasts help them decide when to increase patrols, and crime trend maps help them determine where those patrols should go.
    Likewise, they schedule special events for slow periods.
    “When we have our fi rst real cold snap, crime really drops significantly,” Krokoff said. “Lots of snow — snow does have a tremendous effect on crime. We can pull in some resources to work on the Police Athletic League, for example.”
    Krokoff is watching the Los Angeles Police Department and others that have purchased new predictive policing software, in which they plug in seemingly unrelated data and get quick answers about where they should patrol.
    “It can actually map out for you where crime is most likely to occur,” he said.
    For now, his analysts do that laboriously, by hand. What intrigues him is that the software can take into account data the analysts wouldn’t know to consider. Among those items might be code violations or weather forecasts.
    “And it could tell us exactly how many cars are needed where,” he said.
    But he isn’t ready to make the investment yet.
    “It’s still kind of in its infancy,” he said. “Let’s see what this really produces.”
    Having maps based on crime trends counts toward an offi cer’s reasonable suspicion — legal grounds for stopping a passer-by. But he doesn’t think judges would look kindly on officers who simply said a “black box” told them to focus on a particular address. ........................>>>>..................>>>>......................http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00100&AppName=1

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Krokoff is watching the Los Angeles Police Department and others that have purchased new predictive policing software, in which they plug in seemingly unrelated data and get quick answers about where they should patrol.

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Fourth Amendment - U.S. Constitution
Fourth Amendment - Search and Seizure

Amendment Text | Annotations

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

4th Amendment Annotations
Search and Seizure  
History and Scope of the Amendment  
History  
Scope of the Amendment  
The Interest Protected  
Arrests and Other Detentions  
Searches and Inspections in Noncriminal Cases  
Searches and Seizures Pursuant to Warrant  
Issuance by Neutral Magistrate  
Probable Cause  
Particularity  
First Amendment Bearing on Probable Cause and Particularity  
Property Subject to Seizure  
Execution of Warrants  
Valid Searches and Seizures Without Warrants  
Detention Short of Arrest: Stop-and-Frisk  
Search Incident to Arrest  
Vehicular Searches  
Vessel Searches  
Consent Searches  
Border Searches  
''Open Fields''  
''Plain View''  
Public Schools  
Government Offices  
Prisons and Regulation of Probation  
Drug Testing  
Electronic Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment  
The Olmstead Case  
Federal Communications Act  
Nontelephonic Electronic Surveillance  
The Berger and Katz Cases  
Warrantless ''National Security'' Electronic Surveillance  
Enforcing the Fourth Amendment: The Exclusionary Rule  
Alternatives to the Exclusionary Rule  
Development of the Exclusionary Rule  
The Foundations of the Exclusionary Rule  
Narrowing Application of the Exclusionary Rule  
Operation of the Rule: Standing  

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The 4th Amendment VS. National Healthcare
Working nights is always odd for the personal biosystem.  I woke up at 2330 this evening, refreshed and ready to begin my day. Which of course, is my neighbors’ night, and being that I have many friends and family back at GMT -3 and GMT -5 and at least one in GMT 10, its sometime somewhere I guess.  

As I was laying in bed, staring at my pillow, I had a sudden realization of a situation analogous to nationalized healthcare.  

The Fourth Ammendment of the US Constitution reads as follows:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Basically, this means that the clothes you are wearing, your body fluids, your bag, purse or briefcase, your hardcopy and digital files, etc, are free from physical inspection or electronic inspection (bugs etc.) unless the lawful group investigating you has a warrant.

Most people however, are blissfully unaware that the the Constitution does not guarantee their rights.  It enumerates them.  Only hard work guarantees your rights.  The early civil rights movement was based on this.  Blacks insisting they could go to colleges or ride where they wished on busses was an example of working to guarantee rights. Those rights were listed on paper, they were the law of the land, but until blacks demanded the system follow its own rules, the old abuses continued.

Sadly, the Fourth Amendment, “The right of the people…against unreasonable searches…” is completely ignored in regards to certain groups of people.  

The first, and most obvious group is prisoners.  No one is going to raise any objection to a prisoners room being searched without a warrant, and they regularly are.

The next group is children in public schools.  This one is a little odder.  If  child is walking to school a police officer requires a warrant to take his bag away and search it. However, if the officer follows the child into school, he may now search the child’s bag without a warrant. Since the Constitution requires probable cause, this is to say that every child in school is a potential criminal.

The next group is service members.  That’s right. If you are in the US military you have no fourth amendment rights.  All of your phone calls can be monitored, all your emails monitored, and all your property searched.  This does not refer to when you are one base, but when you are off base, or in your home.  

The next group government workers, who’s offices may be searched at anytime for any reason without warrant.

The final group is people who live in Section 8 housing. The police need only 2 warrants for a Section 8 housing complex to search the entire housing complex. For reasons I will explain in a moment, this one is the most disturbing.

By putting all the cases together, we can establish some trends.  If you live in government housing, be it a prison or a base, you have no 4th Amendment rights.  If you work in, or attend something in (like school) a government building, you have no 4th Amendment rights.  And finally, with Section 8, if you own property in the same building as people who own property but take a check from the government, you have no 4th Amendment rights.

Section 8, aka the projects, are not universally government owned buildings.  Many privately held apartments accept Section 8 payments from some residents.  So, a privately owned building, sub-sectioned and leased by law abiding citizens, my be searched in its entirety because 2 residents take money from the government.   That doesn’t make sense.  Law abiding citizens may have their 4th Amendment rights suspended for living in the same building as accused (not proven) criminals.

In other words, if receive money from the government in any form besides tax rebates and social security, your phone may be bugged at anytime, your house searched at any time, your computer searched at anytime.  

So, I ask you to consider in this pre-existing environment, is the socialization of American health care likely to result in greater freedom of the citizen from unreasonable searches, or greater freedom of the government to search?

This is not to say that socialization of healthcare is per say bad.  It’s just to spot a trend, and suggest where that trend is headed. I further say that absolutely no one will do anything about this.

Any attempt to uphold any rights whatsoever of criminals will be seen as “soft on crime”. Any attempt to uphold the rights of those on Section 8 will be seen as “Pro lazy welfare mom and anti cop, anti American”.   Any attempt to uphold the rights of children would be perhaps the most politically suicidal “Endangered our Children!”.  That leaves US service members and Government employees. City and State governments rarely take on the Federal Government.  There are federal funds that they need too badly to rock the boat over what amounts to employee rights.

This will get worse, not better.

Quoted from senders

don't live here but track everyone like the blips in an XBOX video game.....

THAT'S THE VALUE OF OUR TAXES PAID.....PRICELESS

Quoted from mikechristine1

Did they predict the 4 year old walking on Eastern Ave this afternoon no coat or shoes