The Police Are Now Calculating Your Threat ‘Score’

Better not start linking peoples GTA Online account to people, the majority of todays youth will be off to a bad start. ;)
 
lcpiper said:
If the prison system is supposed to be "correctional" then this concept sorta flies in the face of that concept don't it?

I mean, a whole lot of tax money has gone toward the idea of prison reform focused on rehabilitating convicts and helping them reenter society as nice boys and girls. But this is just another example of why reality doesn't match up well with the touchy feelly folk's ideas. We all know most crime is committed by repeat offenders, etc etc and then now we are going to weight in on people's threat score and I think you get the picture.
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Knowing people that have went to jail or prison I can say it does correct some people.

But I wouldn't be surprised if that number isn't less than 30% overall. To lazy to go look up stats on what the real number is for repeat offenders, just saying that I wouldn't be surprised if it was a low number like that.

That said I don't see what that has to do with my comment. This system is looking at your criminal record, it is looking at social media, it is looking at things that you have already done to determine how much of a risk you are during the committing of a crime so they know how to react to you.

But in many cases the crime or situation should already lend to that itself to a good degree, when it doesn't there are times that your past info doesn't mean anything or times where they can't run a threat score.

Lets look at your girl raped story, Lets say cops pull up. They don't know any names so they can't run a threat score. So it is worthless in trying to decide is this person going to shot me or just wave a gun at me. Lets say they know a name but don't know he has a gun till he pulls it. do you expect him to say hold on, I need to run your threat score to see if you will do anything before he pulls his gun and shoots at the person getting ready to maybe shoot him? Probably not so it doesn't mean anything there and wouldn't have made any difference in cops getting on scene while she was getting rapped or not.

Lets look at a case of a person never being arrested, never posting anything bad on social media. One day they snap, go into work and kill 10 people while making everyone get into a single room. Every ten minutes they pull one person out, tell them why they hated working with them and kill them. Threat score will come back clean as he never did anything, does that really mean anything since they just snapped and are killing people?

My comment was that I personally don't see this score being of much use in many cases as you are either presented with a case where that score should be nothing based on what is being done at the time. IE low risk and high risk person holding a gun to their wife's head both being a bad thing. Or you are making a judgement about somebody being a risk based on some basis. IE all people who play video games are violent people. everyone who has ever looked up a gun is a violent person, everyone who looks up odd drugs is a violent person, or everyone that looks up odd things they hear about on the internet are rapist or worse.

By the time that this information would / could be used it doesn't do any good, in my own opinion, in most cases. It is one thing to say this person hasn't done anything yet, however based on this score we think they might vs this person has or is committing a crime do we need 2 cops or do we need to send in swat. Since this is only used for the later to me this doesn't appear to be any more useful than existing methods.
 
lcpiper said:
Cops don't pull people over without running the tag and checking the vehicle owner info before they hit the lights.
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Put yourself in the officers shoes.

You are already operating a motor vehicle and thinking about many things at once, including the safety of the stop from other drivers and the like. You may already be holding a lot of information in your head from dispatch too, so a system that automatically scans the license plate without me having to do anything, and then pops up on my screen with a threat score on the top right corner (perhaps even just colors GREEN/ YELLOW/ RED) is helpful to me.

Perhaps the guy steps out of his vehicle and I don't have time to run everything manually. If I already saw a red flag pop up automatically with the vehicle owner's picture, I can be in the right state of mind for that.

I can't see how this could possibly be perceived as a bad idea, unless the cost is very high.
 
If you look at my past record (tons of speeding tickets, but no real crime) I'm squeaky clean. However, if someone hurt my wife or one of my kids, I would tear them to shreds far beyond what would be considered defensive. So at that specific point in time I would become a criminal. I have no intention of becoming one, I've never been one, but there are some potential cases where I wouldn't hesitate. How would that figure into all of this?
 
Ducman69 said:
Put yourself in the officers shoes.

You are already operating a motor vehicle and thinking about many things at once, including the safety of the stop from other drivers and the like. You may already be holding a lot of information in your head from dispatch too, so a system that automatically scans the license plate without me having to do anything, and then pops up on my screen with a threat score on the top right corner (perhaps even just colors GREEN/ YELLOW/ RED) is helpful to me.

Perhaps the guy steps out of his vehicle and I don't have time to run everything manually. If I already saw a red flag pop up automatically with the vehicle owner's picture, I can be in the right state of mind for that.

I can't see how this could possibly be perceived as a bad idea, unless the cost is very high.
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Sorry Ducman69, but this is what they are trained to do, and the reason they always seem to be in no real hurry is because they are pacing themselves out for just these reasons. They are not in a rush because rushing is how mistakes are made.

Everything is a series of steps, you do this, then you check that. Now I can see a rookie getting it wrong, but once you've made a hundred or so stops, well if you haven't got it down pretty good you might be in the wrong profession. Make it a few hundred stops and now you have it down to an art form. You not only know all the steps by heart, but you actually know exactly why all the steps are important.

But what I am really trying to say is that this is just reinventing the wheel. The cops know that sometimes the situation is exactly what they thought it would be when they arrive. Sometimes they are even dealing with the same people who keep getting into the same situations. They also know that sometimes it's nothing like what they expected. They are trained to expect the unexpected and I don't think a threat score will do anything to change that.

I can say this, as long as cops wait for something to happen before they start checking out who is who, they will always be reactive when they enter a situation. All the talk in the papers, etc, I think this sounds like someone wants to sell them on the idea that they can score people ahead of time, get a head start, be predictive. I can't say I like that idea. I can't say I like the idea of the cops using this threat score as a predictive tool that will encourage them to focus on what they think will be coming up. I know they are actually doing this already to some degree. But it could go farther and I don't know if that is really beneficial.
 
J3RK said:
If you look at my past record (tons of speeding tickets, but no real crime) I'm squeaky clean. However, if someone hurt my wife or one of my kids, I would tear them to shreds far beyond what would be considered defensive. So at that specific point in time I would become a criminal. I have no intention of becoming one, I've never been one, but there are some potential cases where I wouldn't hesitate. How would that figure into all of this?
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No, not at that time ... at the time you made this comment you got a higher threat score, (theoretically), and it could impact how Officers respond and react to you in the future and that is the issue.
 
lcpiper said:
Sometimes they are even dealing with the same people who keep getting into the same situations.
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Which is a huge advantage to them when they do know someone's threat score from experience.

And people tend to associate with those that are similar to them. Guess how many friends I have that have a criminal history whatsoever? ZERO. But a guy that ran from the cops in 2012 and got a DUI in 2013, guess what, he probably has irresponsible a-hole friends just like him in the car, and a red flag for the police officer can put him in the right frame.

And of course you can score people ahead of time to predict future behavior. We do that all the time when applying for a loan for example. "So just because I didn't pay back a bunch of people last year means I'm more of a risk to people this year than someone with a squeaky clean record for three decades!?!?!?!" Yes, yes, that is exactly what that means. ;)

It also would allow them to be more lenient to someone with a virtually zero threat score that they know is otherwise a good person, versus say some career criminal where its probably not the first time they've been a douche to society.
 
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