American Police Beat: January 2018 9 This data’s freakin huge! In the movies all this stuff works like a charm and no one is worried about the whole “garbage in, garbage out” process that leads to worse results than advertised. What you put in the machine determines what you get out ★ forcement. Whether those changes are for better or worse remains to be seen. What’s fascinating about the tech industry marketing “big data” to law enforcement is the fact that the world of public safety is increasingly char- acterized by less and in- complete data. You might even call it “small data.” For instance, the FBI last year dropped about 70 percent of the infor- mation previously made available in the Uniform Crime Report compiled by the Bureau of Jus- tice Statistics. This information rep- resents what officers would input into the pre- dictive policing software they bought to make crime fighting more ef- ficient by focusing on so-called “hot spots.” So basically whatever the computer decides is the best way to approach crime fighting locally will be based on data that can charitably be described as incomplete and more ad- equately called “woefully inaccurate.” Critics of big data use the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” when de- scribing the shortfalls of tech-based policing. FBI officials have a rather bizarre explanation about why they dropped so many categories, tables and information from their crime reporting – based on voluntary report- ing from local agencies. The FBI says the reason so much data is missing is that they are now using “big data.” When reporters from FiveThirtyEight published an article that noted that the FBI’s most recent accounting of crime data in the United States was missing almost 70 percent of data previously avail- able, the FBI responded in a written statement. The statement said that the FBI “has been work- ing on what has become the UCR-Technical Re- fresh since 2010” and that “throughout the planning of this project, it has been the intention of the UCR program to streamline the publications, including Crime in the United States (CIUS), and to reduce the number of data tables in the reports.” This is all complicat- ed and tricky account- ing stuff, so we’ll let FiveThirtyEight take it from here. “Rather than stream- line by providing users swifter access to the data, perhaps the FBI is now looking to streamline by decreasing the amount of data they provide. Given that the FBI has not yet responded to further re- quests for comment, we’re left to read between the lines,” an article posted to FiveThirtyEight reads. So in other words, one apparent solution to data management is to simply dump a lot of the data, thereby making it virtu- ally impossible to know much about crime rates. And considering the value of issues like crime rates politically, maybe that’s the idea. Most people think crime being down is a good thing. For others, good crime numbers make it very hard to get people to vote, buy software and increase budgets. Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master. 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