black…MYstory

I live in the Cincinnati, Ohio area and, sometimes, I believe that some of the stupidest ideas and concepts I have ever heard were born here. Today, I bring you such an example.

We have a group of people here who are looking to publish a list of 1500+ people who they call “likely killers”. I have seen this described as the “Minority Report”, referring to the movie where people were arrested, before a crime was commited, based on the predictions of psychics.

So, if you have people ready to publish a list of “likely killers”, you would think they would be crime experts, right?

Bad assumption. The backers of this list include two city council candidates, Charlie Windburn (a former councilman) and Melanie Bates (a woman whose husband was killed in a robbery last year). Another backer is Todd Portune, a county commissioner. None of these people have law enforcement backgrounds.

The program used to compile this list was created by crime activist Chris Kearney, who has a background in information technology but, again, not in law enforcement. The criteria he used to come up with a list were “all people in Hamilton County who’ve committed a violent crime in the past 12 months and who also have a prior conviction for a gun or drug crime.”

Now, let’s get to my problems with this. First is the fact that you are about to publish a list of names of people who you identify as potential killers. So, if any of them are trying to turn their lives around you have just made them the targets of law enforcement and just generated a “do not hire” list for all potential employers. Can anyone smell the lawsuits coming?

Secondly, you are using pseudo-science to predict a criminal act. You are not including psychological profiles and not accounting for how much violence occurred in previous crimes. These are just two considerations I can think of but, when you talk criminal profiling, you have many to consider.

Finally, just because you can create a computer program does not mean that it’s any good at its job. I could pick a random sampling of any 1500 people and, no doubt, a few could be killers, regardless of criminal background. So, in this case, if a few turn out to be killers, it would likely be more coincidental than predictory. However, what makes this more dangerous is that you create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. You cut off avenues for people seeking to turn their lives around, which pushes them back out into the streets and they commit crimes that result in them killing someone.

Sadly, you have a group of people who got together and thought this was a good idea. Even more sad is the fact that they have supporters for this nonsense. If they focused as hard on bettering employment opportunities in Cincinnati as they did on backing this mess, we would have real strategies for reducing crime.

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