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Well, I don’t know. A 1 in 8 chance of getting shot is actually really high, and in just a year and a half? Like sure street knowledge is cheap and directionally accurate, but judging a “more likely than others to be shot” is a lot easier than “is among the absolute top candidates to be shot”, right?
I think if you pick the right subcultures of active/adjacent criminals you'd reach that kind of number. Certain rap scenes feel like that'd almost be an understatement of the shooting risk.
But this would require skill and insider information and subjective analysis. Having a deterministic, mechanical process with known inputs that can process this data goes a long way towards preventing someone from corruptly picking and choosing which places they count as "high risk" and which they don't. And lowering variance, since some individuals are going to be better at doing this sort of subjective guesswork than others, while the AI can have its performance actually tested.
And goes a long way towards laundering this in the public perception. Even if everyone "knows" that this group is high risk, having an AI with testable metrics say so is probably going to be easier to sell (in the long run) than having human beings say so.
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Not really- gangs work like armies in microcosm. Theres plenty of people who do things like logistical support (ie transporting narcotics, guns, and fellow gang members) and administrative work (even drug dealers need some sort of accountants, and babysitting offspring is a non-trivial challenge), and a relatively small number of infrantry/grunts/bangers who are on the "front lines". It may not be obvious to outsiders, but gang members and associates certainly know who is most likely to be involved in violence.
I think you’re way overstating the organization of street level gangs. Cartels probably operate this way, but your median street level gang is just some teenaged boys with a semi-charismatic leader, and none of them are willing to specialize outside of frontline operations or leadership.
Now there’s certainly more sophisticated gangs who have accountants, employee benefits coordinators, internal tribunals, money laundering specialists, specialized smugglers and straw purchase administrators, etc. I don’t think that’s what this AI was applied too.
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Depends on where you draw the brackets. As you say, 1 in 8 is already really high, and i'm pretty sure you could get close to that over the couse of a lifetime (if not the next year and a half) simply by looking for people who hang out in sketchy places with sketchy people.
To build on my previous example, everyone in the nieghborhood knows that the middle Williams boy has always been a bit "exictable" / prone to violent outbursts and now he's started a beef with the local drug dealer. What are the odds he ends up getting shot, stabbed, or arrested in the next 18 months? 1 in 8 seems positively generous in that context.
I think that was more true in the old days of organized crime, but these days some of the bigger U.S. cities (well at least Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia) have mostly disorganized crime where it's mostly small scale block gangs beefing with each other over instagram posts. Actual drug infrastructure exists but isn't fighting over territory as much and is avoiding doing dumb shit like rapping about pissing on the corpse of somebody's best friend. With the social media data and complete lack of op sec these guys have it's pretty easy to tell who is going to get killed.
Even today i would expect the violent crime (or at least the lethal variety thereof) to follow a similar pattern. Murders generally dont happen "out of the blue" and when they do happen (see Asian ladies getting pushed in front of trains) they get treated as news-worthy precisely because they are a deviation from the norm.
To paraphrase Heath Ledger's Joker, nobody freeks out when a gangbanger gets shot.
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