ORCA: a different kind of whale watching
by digby
Oh, goodie. More military technology being put to civilian use:
According to MIT’s Technology Review, there are plenty of sociological similarities between insurgents and American street gangs. “In the last 10 years or so, researchers have revolutionized the way military analysts think about insurgency and the groups of people involved in it,” explains the Review. “Their key insight is that insurgency tends to run in families and in social networks that are held together by common beliefs.”
So it makes sense that the insights gleaned by Army intelligence could help out police officers at home. That hunch was confirmed on June 28th, when a group of West Point researchers published a paper that details how a similar software is being used to track gang violence.
The software is called Organizational, Relationship, and Contact Analyzer, or ORCA, and it groups people in a particular community by their known relationships, as well as their arrest records. Based on the algorithm, they can predict whether a particular person is likely to be a gang member; It’s also able to map “corner crews,” which operate hyper-locally, and “seed sets,” or individuals who are highly influential.
For this particular study, ORCA was tested on a three-year history of 5,400 arrests. Based on those numbers, it revealed 11,000 relationships, created a network map of 468 members belonging to about 20 gangs. The analysis is continuing through this summer in a “major metropolitan area,” though they won’t name which one. Eventually, the software could become ubiquitous in police stations nation-wide. It seems that crime, just like business, always comes down to your relationships.
The good news is that the government would never allow all that surveillance information they’re collecting on Americans and storing for future use to be used for the purpose of discovering whether someone is “likely” to be a criminal based on his or her “associations.” Because the constitution.
Certainly, the fact that the FBI is the go-between on all the data collection should not make anyone suspect they might want to use the information for purposes other than terrorism (oh, and we now know, nuclear proliferation, hacking and espionage.) It’s not as if gangs could be connected to “narco-terrorism” or anything. That could never happen.
Also too: the militarization of the police continues apace.
h/t to @bmaz.