Predictions put into practice: a quasi-experimental evaluation of Chicago’s predictive policing pilot

Objectives

In 2013, the Chicago Police Department conducted a pilot of a predictive policing program designed to reduce gun violence. The program included development of a Strategic Subjects List (SSL) of people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence who were then referred to local police commanders for a preventive intervention. The purpose of this study is to identify the impact of the pilot on individual- and city-level gun violence, and to test possible drivers of results.

Methods

The SSL consisted of 426 people estimated to be at highest risk of gun violence. We used ARIMA models to estimate impacts on city-level homicide trends, and propensity score matching to estimate the effects of being placed on the list on five measures related to gun violence. A mediation analysis and interviews with police leadership and COMPSTAT meeting observations help understand what is driving results.

Results

Individuals on the SSL are not more or less likely to become a victim of a homicide or shooting than the comparison group, and this is further supported by city-level analysis. The treated group is more likely to be arrested for a shooting.

Conclusions

It is not clear how the predictions should be used in the field. One potential reason why being placed on the list resulted in an increased chance of being arrested for a shooting is that some officers may have used the list as leads to closing shooting cases. The results provide for a discussion about the future of individual-based predictive policing programs.

     

The economics of the women's movement

In recent years, the political process has seemed to become increasingly favorable to issues involving women, as shown by the relatively large number of states which have passed the Equal Rights Amendment. The economic theory of politics would imply that this result would occur if the interests of women in removing labor force sex discrimination had increased. We argue that most sex descrimination in hiring and pay of women is in the form of statistical discrimination where sex is used as a proxy for labor force attachment. If this is so, then, on net, sex discrimination in employment practices would pay in the sense that the gainers from such behavior would gain more than the losers would lose. Married women would share in such gains since they would be compensated for their lower earnings by the higher earnings of their husbands. Single women, however, would receive no such compensation. We therefore hypothesize that the recent increase in legislation benefitting women is related to marriage rates, not to female labor force participation. Using votes in the state legislatures on the ERA as a measure of success by state of the women's movement, we find that our results do hold — number of single women is significant in explaining such voting but female labor force participation is not significant.     

Is That What I Said?: Witnesses' Responses to Interviewer Modifications

Modifications occur when interviewers contradict statements made by witnesses or imply that witnesses provided information that they (interviewers) did not provide. Because of their suggestive nature, modifications threaten the reliability of investigative interviews. This study investigated developmental differences in witnesses' responses to modifications during interviews as well as in inclusion of modified misinformation in subsequent answers. Preschool, elementary school, and college students were interviewed about a video presentation. In the experimental conditions, the interviewer contradicted information about the video provided by the participants. Participants then answered two sets of follow-up questions: one immediately following the interview and another 6–8 days later. Results indicated that participants were more likely to ignore modifications than to correct or agree with them. Adult participants were most likely to disagree with modifications. Preschoolers were most likely to incorporate modified misinformation into subsequent answers. Implications of these findings for investigative interviews are discussed.     

Citizenship: Care of the Self,Character and Personality

Recent attempts to reinvigorate citizenship have been rooted in a romantic impulse. The current nostalgia over citizenship strives to recuperate the participatory involvement of the small community with face-to-face interaction. This article advances a conception of citizenship that attends more closely to the agonistic ways that citizens have been historically constructed in order to challenge the romanticism of civic republicanism. We draw on those aspects of the Foucauldian governmentality literature concerned with the care of the self. Citizenship is a technology of government that constitutes membership in a political community that requires both self-mastery and attention to relations with others. Importance is attached to truth-telling since this is what makes one a subject of government. We argue that an historical shift occurred between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from a subjectivity rooted in ‘character’ to one based on ‘personality’ that corresponded to changes in the prevailing form of citizenship and the practices of the self. The preoccupation with ‘building character’ involved a caring for the self that was based on striving for conformity with a set of public virtues. The emphasis on personality involved a care of the self organized around the quest for a unique self. This phase in the care of the self marks a shift in the ethical requirements of effective citizenship and as a result, represents a new form of truth-telling. We argue that these two forms of caring for the self mark a decisive mutation in the characteristics that were considered desirable for citizens to exhibit.     

The health and human rights movement: progress and obstacles

There is a new maturity about the health and human rights movement as it endeavours to integrate human rights into health policies at the national and international levels. In addition to the traditional human rights techniques, such as "naming and shaming", the movement is also using new approaches such as indicators, benchmarks and impact assessments. However, it is confronted with a range of major obstacles and this article focuses on two of them: the inadequate engagement within the health and human rights movement of (i) established human rights non-governmental organisations and (ii) health professionals. This article argues that established human rights non-governmental organisations should work on health and human rights issues, such as maternal mortality, just as vigorously as they already campaign on disappearances, torture and prisoners of conscience. Also, it emphasises that health and human rights complement and reinforce each other. Nevertheless, many health professionals have never heard of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The article argues that there is no chance of operationalising the right to health without the active engagement of many more health professionals, and it makes some preliminary observations about steps that might be taken to deepen health professionals' engagement in the health and human rights movement.     

Borders and frontiers in women's history

Abstract

This article, based largely on London material, seeks to explore the interaction of various pressures from home, from school and from domestic education advocates on girls in their last two years at elementary school before leaving at fourteen. It examines in particular the extent and nature of resistance from some teachers and other educationists to overmuch domestic tuition for pupils, seeing this as leading to a narrowed perspective and as an unwarranted interference with the girls' right to a good general education. Given the strong official backing and widespread public agreement in the early twentieth century for the need to domesticate girls at school along approved lines, the determination of teachers and others to uphold the counter-claims of general education deserves detailed study.     

Writing Cartographies of Violence: Nation Building through State Failure

Literacy and literature were central to the birth of the modern nation state. Yet few studies explore the importance of literature in contemporary state construction. In this article, the ongoing importance of literacy and literature in (re)producing the Colombian nation state is studied. Since the colonial era, literacy has conferred the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, first to an elite few and now to the vast majority of people. The democratization of the ability to author the nation has allowed common people to contest and contribute to elite narratives. In this article the content of competing stories of the nation state is analyzed. It argues that these writings have had contradictory effects, successfully consolidating national identity as a nation swathed in violence while undermining the state by revealing its inability to provide security for the majority of its citizens.