gun violence in the city, although Papachristos has distanced himself
from the SSL.[85] The list itself is based on an algorithm that
calculates risk scores for certain city inhabitants. According to its
developers, the SSL does not explicitly include factors like gender,
race or location. For several years, though, it wasn’t clear what did go
into it. After pressure from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago
Police Department finally released the SSL data in 2017. The dataset
contained the information that went into the algorithm – like age, gang
affiliations, and prior arrests – as well as the corresponding risk
scores it produced. Researchers were positive about the move. ‘It’s
incredibly rare – and valuable – to see the public release of the
underlying data for a predictive policing system,’ noted Brianna
Posadas, a fellow with the social justice organisation Upturn.[86]
There were around 400,000 people in the full SSL database, with
almost 290,000 of them deemed high risk. Although the algorithm
didn’t explicitly include race as an input, there was a noticeable
difference between groups: over half of black twenty-something men
in Chicago had an SSL score, compared with 6 per cent of white
men. There were also a lot of people who had no clear link to violent
crime, with around 90,000 ‘high-risk’ individuals having never been
arrested or a victim of crime.[87]
This raises the question of what to do with such scores. Should
police monitor people who don’t have any obvious connection to
violence? Recall that Papachristos’s network studies in Chicago
focused on victims of gun violence, not perpetrators; the aim of such
analysis was to help save lives. ‘One of the inherent dangers of
police-led initiatives is that, at some level, any such efforts will
become offender-focused,’ Papachristos wrote in 2016. He argued
that there is a role for data in crime prevention, but it doesn’t have to
be solely a police matter. ‘The real promise of using data analytics to
identify those at risk of gunshot victimization lies not with policing, but
within a broader public health approach.’ He suggested that predicted
victims could benefit from the support of people like social workers,
psychologists, and violence interrupters.
Successful crime reduction can come in a variety of forms. In
1980, for example, West Germany made it mandatory for