IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019 - 48

increased surveillance, or to round them up for questioning after a violent crime. Detailed analysis of the effects
of these practices bear out the futility of these interventions. Accordingly, this approach can best be characterized as "Models of Threat." Individuals on the SSL are
seen as threats, and are themselves threatened and subjected to additional police attention, and are much more
likely to be questioned and arrested. Indeed, from a
crime statistics perspective, the success of a police
department rests on the number of violent crimes, and
many gun crimes are the result of and/or give rise to
retaliation, so it makes sense to combine the victims and
perpetrators of violence in a single metric. In other
words, individuals likely to be involved in violence are a
"threat" to the department's CompStat numbers, regardless of whether they are victims or perpetrators. Thus, in
a Models of Threat approach, even a victim is viewed as a
"threat." Yet, in any commonsense approach to violence
there should be a difference in how one approaches or
intervenes with an individual who is likely to be a victim
from someone likely to be a perpetrator.15 It would be difficult to argue this approach has improved policing - for
instance by making police work more efficient according
to its own metrics - when it has been proven to have no
effect on violent crime on either an individual or community level. And while conflating victims and perpetrators is
poor data practice, it is not clear that "getting the data
right" would actually improve the results of SSL. It is
hoped that an AI ethic would be able to avoid such ineffectual and counterproductive applications. But to do so,
it must look beyond the numbers and datasets, to understand how data and information systems are embedded
in communities and policing practices.

Nothing Stops a Bullet Like a Job
The Ethics of Care approach offers a stark contrast to the
Models of Threat. One Summer started as a pilot program in the summer of 2011 by the City of Chicago. In
2012 it became part of a controlled study (One Summer Plus) by researchers at the University of Chicago
Crime Lab. The basic idea was to intervene with at-risk
youth by providing them with summer jobs, for 8 weeks
and 25 hours a week at minimum wage, mostly working for organizations focused on their local communities. According to the City's press release about the
program, "at-risk" was defined by a combination of
attending an at-risk school and a review of individual
applications as follows.
15
The assumption made by researchers in doing this appears to be that
there is significant overlap in the categories of victims and perpetrators.
This is especially true given the cyclical nature of gun violence in Chicago,
driven by rivalries and revenge killings that beget further revenge killings.
Still, associating with people connected to violence might make you more
likely to become a victim of violence without becoming more likely to commit violence.

More than 700 youth ages 14-21 were selected to
participate in One Summer Plus in 2012 from an
open application process available at thirteen Chicago public schools located in high-violence and
low-income neighborhoods. Applicants faced a
number of challenges; the year before they
entered the program, they had missed an average
of six weeks of school and about 20 percent had
been arrested [44].
As a data-driven technique, it was largely the schools
that were identified through historical data. While the
methodology used to identify the 13 schools is not discussed in detail, presumably it was based on the geographic location of historical incidence of violence, and
the proximity of those schools to violent areas, in combination with demographic income data. But it is important to note that individual students were initially
identified only by virtue of attending a designated
school. The accepted applicants may have been further
screened for factors such as school attendance, previous arrests, or other factors. But it is worth noting that
this was not a highly sophisticated data-driven technique for identifying which individual youth were "atrisk." As far as the program was concerned, anyone
living in a low-income, high-violence area was "at-risk,"
and more detailed or nuanced classifications were not
essential to participation or effectiveness.
Researchers studying One Summer found a 51%
reduction in involvement in violence-related arrests
among youth who participated in the program compared to the control group that did not participate.16
Their analysis of the data from the initial study, and of
subsequent years, demonstrates that this was not simply the result of getting them off the streets for 25 hours
per week, but that there were significant changes in
their cognitive and behavioral approaches to school,
work and becoming involved in violence [46]. Much of
this was attributed to improved impulse control, learned
both through their employment and through training
sessions they received as part of the program. There
were also economic benefits resulting from the additional income received by the participants and their families, and participants were much more likely to seek and
get jobs after participating in the program.
The One Summer program provides a good illustration of an Ethics of Care approach insofar as it focuses
on the contextual manifestations of violence, and seeks
a means of directly intervening to change that context.
Rather than focusing on the metric or individual
"threat," Ethics of Care focuses on the system. Ethics of
16

Subsequent research places the figure at a 43% reduction in violent
arrests [45].

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

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JUNE 2019

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2019

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