Philip K. Dick - ThisIsCommonSense.org

Whether “predictive policing” is good or bad depends on what it means.

If it means using crime patterns to determine which neighborhoods should get more police patrols, that’s reasonable enough.

But what if it means assuming that certain individuals may commit a crime if left to themselves? And then “preventatively” harassing them?

The Institute for Justice has just won an important victory against predictive policing as practiced by the sheriff’s office of Pasco County, Florida.

The office’s idea was to predict which residents were most likely to commit future crimes. Algorithms — or what IJ attorney Rob Johnson calls a “glorified Excel sheet” — were supposed to perform a function comparable to that of “precogs,” the psychics in the movie Minority Report, who envision future crimes.

To counter the precrime, the sheriff’s office made frequent visits to the homes and haunts of pre-guilty individuals to interrogate them and their families, “sometimes multiple times a week.” Families who objected would get slapped with citations for bogus code violations.

All that’s over with now, we hope.

In response to IJ’s litigation, the sheriff’s office has admitted violating the due process rights and Fourth Amendment rights of the people they harassed, and it has dropped the program.

Scott Bullock observes that if the policy of harassing people based solely on guesses about what they or associates “might” do had been allowed to stand, such a program could easily have spread to other locales.

This is much less likely now.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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While reading CBS’s recent story on Iceland’s success at reducing the number of Down syndrome cases, I was reminded of the Amazon Prime series Man in the High Castle.

The show, based on the celebrated alternative history novel by Philip K. Dick (1928 – 1982), explores a timeline wherein the Axis powers won World War II. The United States is divided between the Greater Nazi Reich and the Empire of Japan.

In one scene, one of the protagonists — a hero? a villain? — is stalled on a Midwest country roadside. He smells something in the air. Smoke. Ash.

The very American sheriff explains: it is a local hospital destroying defective humans. The weak, the sick, the disabled.

And we, the viewers, recoil: how evil. Nazis actually execute the weak, the sick, the disabled. Well, they did, in history, not just fiction.

But, as CBS explains, the reason Down syndrome cases are disappearing all over the place, and in Iceland most of all, is not a new cure. Chalk it up to the rise of prenatal screenings. We see fewer Down syndrome people because, before birth, they are executed. Aborted.

In our non-fictional timeline, many Americans are incensed that a few folks proclaiming to be Nazis have been “allowed” to demonstrate in public.

Nazism is evil. I agree.

But how do these morally horrified people react about the very “progressive” and culturally acceptable practice of killing the unwanted?

Think I’ve gone over the top, have abused a revered author to make a point alien to his own? Well, please read Dick’s “The Pre-Persons,” a story about abortion, way post-natal … until the age at which a person can understand algebra.*

Quite the moral calculation we make, eh?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* That could mean it’s open season for murder as states are moving to drop algebra requirements because so many fail to master the subject.

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