In the 2002 film Minority Report, police officers in a future Washington, D.C. used psychic teenagers who could predict the future to arrest murder suspects before they committed their crimes. Today, the Chicago Police Department believes that it can do roughly the same thing with a computer algorithm.
The Strategic Subject List was first introduced in 2013. Yale sociologist Andrew Papachristos theorized that such a list would be useful, and Illinois Institute of Technology Professor Miles Wernick developed the algorithm. Citing property laws, city officials refuse to release the ten criteria that computer programmers use to compile the SSL, which is now on its fourth incarnation. But, speculation is that the question include things like “Have you been shot in the past?” and “Have you ever been arrested on a weapons violation?” Dr. Wernick insists that the SSL excludes race, gender, geography, and other such factors.
Superintendent Eddie Johnson claims that in a city of almost three million souls, about 1,400 individuals are responsible for most violent crime. In support, he points out that 70% of Chicago murder victims were on the Strategic Subject List, and 80% of the suspects were on the list as well. But others are not convinced, because of the dramatic increase in gun violence over the past several months and concerns about the way the SSL is compiled.
The RAND Corporation is currently evaluating the SSL and its report should be released soon.
The Strategic Subject List
The SSL is somewhat similar to the federal government’s no-fly list, which the FBI compiled in the months following 9/11. Critics of the no-fly list maintain that it is essentially racial profiling, because the majority of the roughly 100,000 people in the database are of Middle Eastern origin. But law enforcement officials have insisted, and courts have generally agreed, that the no-fly list does not violate this aspect of the Due Process clause, because only individuals who are linked to organizations that promote, support, or condone terrorist acts are not allowed to fly in commercial aircraft. The standard is also different, at least arguably, because boarding an aircraft is not a constitutional right.
Closer to home, the SSL and similar lists may be relevant to reasonable suspicion, which is the level of proof needed at the pre-arrest stage of a criminal case. According to the Supreme Court case of Terry v. Ohio (1967), reasonable suspicion must be mostly based on “specific articulable facts.” But officers can supplement these facts by drawing upon their experience and, by analogy, looking at an SSL or other list. But the SSL is not a substitute for facts. If officers seek to arrest an individual largely because of a list, as opposed to things that individual actually did, such a stop is probably unlawful.
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(Photo courtesy of Scott Liddell)