[tesq]

The problem with such a filter is it will be perceived as inefficient and broken by those evaluating it if it denies an officer the authority to arrest someone he's already detained or determined to be worthy of arrest.

It will be another system which grants permission at the whims of the department, one that absolves individual officers of blame, punishment and consequences for bias and abuse they'll continue to revel in.

[sliverstorm]

There is no reason such a filter need be an authoritative source. Arrest someone it didn't suggest, if you like. Choose not to arrest someone it did suggest. Human discretion would still be applied. But if it proved accurate, officers would trust it, and the population would get upset if it identified a criminal an officer did not arrest.

No different than a virus or spam scanner, really. I trust my scanners. Sometimes they are wrong, and I know they are, and I bypass them. But I know they are right most of the time.

You seem to have the notion though that officers do not arrest people to "catch the bad guy". It sounds like you are saying you believe most officers do not actually care if the arrestee is guilty (and will thus ignore the filter always), and merely arrest for kicks/pleasure/vengeance? I do not believe the majority are like that.

[sqrt17]

At least in the US, officers have quotas of arrests to fulfill, which are most easily fulfilled with petty crime that happens all the time and is easy to find. Attorneys get promoted based on successful cases, meaning those where they could convince a jury that the person is guilty; any foresight that goes above or beyond what they can present to a jury of laymen is lost time and will get them recognized as being ineffective.

[tesq]

>You seem to have the notion though that officers do not arrest people to "catch the bad guy". It sounds like you are saying you believe most officers do not actually care if the arrestee is guilty (and will thus ignore the filter always), and merely arrest for kicks/pleasure/vengeance? I do not believe the majority are like that.

You seem to have the notion that I believe what you think I believe. No, I do not believe that officers are arresting people for kicks. I do believe that human bias, power, career building/justification and 'gut feelings' about who might be a bad guy perpetuate unequal application of the law and abuse in a policed society.

I do believe that if a filter sought to mitigate those very real problems it would be fought by the system it meant to augment. I am giving it the very forgiving assumption that those motivations and skews in perception aren't unknowingly built into the filter by its human creators, nor that biased information isn't fed into the filter. If either of those were true, it would be welcomed with open arms by police departments nationwide.

I do believe that such a filter will be perceived as broken or inefficient if it doesn't confirm the officers' preconceived notions about who is a criminal or worthy of arrest.

Unfortunately, I do not believe that the problem is 'the bad guys are getting away, and we need a system to find them'. It's rather the opposite, 'innocent people are having their lives interrupted and sometimes ruined because officers think they look suspicious for reasons and need to justify their paychecks; we need a system to mitigate that'.

I do not think a system that blinks a little arrest light if a suspect is Muslim and uses Google has any place in society, no matter how many times you cry 'b-but machine learning!! Spam filters!! Bayes!!'

Your filter would cement this period's problems into, in the eyes of the public, an infallible machine's instructions and will enable abuse without accountability, because you can always point to the machine and say you followed your best judgment.