Pre-Crime-Fighting: The Ministry for Social Development's interest in Preventive Risk Modelling, as a technique for identifying and rescuing vulnerable children before they grow up to become a burden on society, is strikingly reminiscent of the plot of the science-fiction movie Minority Report. Accusations of racial profiling are inevitable.
HOW LONG WILL IT BE, I wonder, before the Ministry of Social
Development (MSD) is accused of racial profiling? Given the statistical
techniques currently being developed by the Ministry to identify “vulnerable”
clients, such an accusation is practically inevitable.
In collaboration with the University of Auckland, the MSD is
perfecting a technique for filtering out all but the worst offenders when it
comes to deficient education, poor health, inadequate housing, a history of
family violence and/or criminal offending. A filtering process relying upon such
variables, however, cannot fail to generate a strong racial bias. In terms of the
raw numbers, Pakeha will probably still predominate, but Maori and Pasifika
will, almost certainly, find themselves significantly over-represented.
The MSD’s problem is that they cannot avoid using such controversial
techniques for identifying vulnerable clients. Downside political risks
notwithstanding, they are fundamental to the National Government’s new approach
to managing New Zealand’s welfare system. Expressed in its simplest terms, this
new approach is about identifying the individuals and families most likely to
become a long-term drain of the state’s resources – and making sure that they
don’t.
Serious criminal offending, for example, imposes colossal
costs upon the state. A person convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, child
abuse, aggravated robbery and/or serious assault can expect to serve anything
from 5 to 20 years in prison – at a minimum cost to the taxpayer of $100,000
per year. And that figure does not include the cost of repairing and rehabilitating
the victims of criminal offending. The enormous expense of hospitalisation. The
loss of productivity associated with the victims’ pain and suffering. All these
social costs could be dramatically reduced if the people most likely to impose
them could be rescued, early, from themselves.
One of the solutions, according to the MSD, may be found in
the statistical technique known as “predictive risk modelling”. According to
the Ministry’s own website, a ground-breaking piece of research undertaken by a
project team, led by Professor Rhema Vaithianathan of the University of
Auckland, has “developed a predictive risk model for children in a cohort who
had contact with the benefit system before age two. These children accounted
for 83% of all children for whom findings of substantiated maltreatment were
recorded by age 5.”
The Ministry further reported that “predictive risk
modelling had a fair, approaching good, power in predicting which of the young
children having contact with the benefit system would be the subject of
substantiated maltreatment by age five. This is similar to the predictive
strength of mammograms for detecting breast cancer in the general population.”
Given the well-attested link between childhood abuse and
serious criminal offending in later life, the possibilities arising out of
Professor Vaithianathan’s and her team’s research are obvious. If predictive
risk modelling (PRM) could identify with relative precision which children, in
which families, were most likely to suffer abuse, appropriate “wrap-around”
intervention by the MSD, the Police, Child Youth and Family, the Department of
Corrections and the Department of Courts could ensure that the predicted abuse
(and everything likely to flow from it in the future) never happened.
The popular culture reference you’re looking for here is the
film Minority Report. Based on the
novella by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the movie is set in a
futuristic Washington DC, where a special “precrime” squad of police officers
use “psychic technology” to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their
crime.
Now, it would be quite unfair to suggest that PRM is in any
way analogous to “psychic technology”, but it’s undeniable that the former’s
widespread use in our social welfare system would give rise to just as many
ethical questions as Philip K. Dick’s pre-crime-fighters.
In the section of the University of Auckland study relating
to PRMs ethical ramifications, the Project Team drew the MSD’s attention to the
dangers of the data arising from its application being misinterpreted:
“It must be acknowledged that some of the data and predictor
variables used by the proposed model are highly likely to be misinterpreted by
at least some audiences. The decision not to report coefficients in this
report, for instance, was based in part upon the belief that the insignificant
contribution those factors make to the power of the tool was outweighed by the
likelihood of crude and misleading interpretations of that information given
existing social prejudices and stereotypes.”
Which brings us back to our original question concerning
racial profiling. It would be most surprising if the unwillingness of the
Auckland academics to identify all the coefficients used in their predictive
algorithms was not, at least in part, related to race as a predictive factor in
the maltreatment of children. It would, however, be equally surprising if the
prospect of Maori and Pasifika families being targeted for special “precrime”
intervention on behalf of their infant offspring was not met with loud,
sustained, and entirely justifiable protest.
There is something profoundly disturbing in the very notion
that science possesses the power to predict who will – and who will not –
inflict harm upon their fellow human-beings. That, somehow, a computer
programme can winnow out from tens-of-thousands, the one family in which
violence will be done to a child.
Because, even if we could be sure that the child identified
through PRM was bound, in every case, to suffer abuse if some form of welfare intervention
did not take place, there is another, deeper, question that must be confronted.
If individual cases of abuse could be predicted and prevented, what incentive
would there be to address the systemic causes of human tragedy?
If Maori and Pasifika appear more often than they should
among the perpetrators of child abuse it is only because they appear more often
than they should among all the other “coefficients” of dysfunction: illiteracy;
the diseases of poverty and overcrowding; the psychological deterioration
caused by long periods of unemployment; the mental disintegration associated
with drug addiction. These pathologies are the symptoms of class as well as
racial oppression. Capitalism and colonialism are “coefficients” too.
Let us leave the final word to another artefact of pop-culture.
Perhaps the most surprising of all Elvis Presley’s hits is his extraordinary
rendition of Scott Davis’s song, In The
Ghetto. To those seeking to transform our social welfare system into
something resembling science-fiction, I would strongly recommend Elvis’s
poignant retelling of the story of a boy whose fate was sealed at birth: not by
the choices he or his mamma made, but by the system that left them with so few:
And as her young man dies
On a cold and grey Chicago morning,
Another little baby child is born
In the Ghetto.
Video courtesy of YouTube
This essay was
originally posted on The Daily Blog
of Wednesday, 3 June 2015.
