My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Four. Jail, and Killers. Louis Shalako.

The three killers, ladies and gentlemen...

Louis Shalako

Jail, and killers. It was in 2003 when I found myself in jail, for the first and only time in my life.

As one might imagine, the experience was extremely educational.

A bit of background. I had bought my Great Aunt’s house in the south end. She was in an old age home, and my Aunt Sharon suggested I put in an offer. My mother encouraged me as well.

The house wasn’t even on the market, but she’d been in the old age home for over a year, and it was clear she wasn’t getting out—she wasn’t coming home, ever again. I hadn’t been there three weeks when I knew there was a problem. The neighbour was already showing his true colours. The one guy on my right side was the instigator, and the guy who lived to my left was his work buddy, in fact an employee. I was on disability. Unfortunately for me, I could still walk, I could still talk. Quite frankly, it was too bad I didn’t die, it would have made things a lot easier for everybody else.

The problem was pain, ladies and gentlemen. I’d fallen through a scaffolding, May 4, 1989, working on a building in Hamilton, Ontario. Some guys had been asked to clear a bunch of stuff off the roof. Like the dangerous fools that they were, they yelled to look out down below, and proceeded to throw all these scaffolding frames and cedar planks off of the top of a six-story building. As one might imagine, they were fired on the same afternoon. The construction company, what with being a bunch of cheap pricks and all, kept the planks, and one of them split as I was walking across it. This is where I failed to fall to my death, ladies and gentlemen.

There were a few brothers. The one guy who did not get fired was Mike, who was not there that day. Mike was in court that day. Mike was out on bail, on a homicide beef, this guy had a wife and a kid living downtown. I heard later he was convicted, after all these years, he is probably out by now…

There I was, living on a $930.00 per month Ontario Disability Support Program pension, and I’ve just bought a house, and the fucking neighbour didn’t like it—

That is all I can figure there, it makes as much sense as any other explanation.

I lasted four years, with intermittent but persistent harassment from more than one neighbour. When I moved in, I weighed two hundred and ten, two hundred and fifteen pounds. When I moved out, I weighed one hundred seventy-eight pounds…I was riding my bike back and forth to the food bank, I was visiting my old man, now retired, mostly for the purpose of watching his TV, drinking his tea and coffee, and yes, bumming his smokes.

When I went home, he’d let me take a few slices of bread, all buttered up with margarine and a tin of soup or something, a handful of tea bags…a half a dozen cigarettes.

Over the course of those four years, people would bang their fists on the side of my house when coming and going. People followed me around, more than once. On one occasion, driving my dad home from a place uptown, after he’d had one too many drinks, a familiar vehicle came up behind. Recognizing me somehow in the darkness, they proceeded to make mock ramming attacks at the back end, and when a Sarnia cop accidentally observed this behaviour, she pulled me over—not them.

“And what did you do to provoke them, Mister Shalako.” What a stinking whore, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m convinced, only the presence of my old man asleep on the passenger seat saved me from a quick and dirty little roadside execution, and yes, that sounds an awful lot like paranoia.

Some little prick put toast in my mailbox. They put toast in the front and back screen doors, they put toast on every window ledge. What message were you trying to send?

I’m toast? You’re going to burn my house down while I’m sleeping some night?

But that’s what I was up against.

"Who made this diagnosis...???"

When I complained to the police about the neighbour’s harassment, they took me to the loonie bin for three days of observation.

When I wrote letters to the editor complaining about criminal harassment, they were never published, and in the end, the cops came around and took me to the loonie bin again…admittedly I was terribly depressed by this time, but even so.

And when my goofy little neighbour accused me of criminal harassment, the cops promptly arrested me and tossed me in the bucket. I was accused of taking his photograph while him and the other neighbour were illegally dumping behind a local department store, where I had pulled in to answer a call—from my mother, who had given me a cheap flip-type cell-phone, in the rather forlorn hopes that I wouldn’t feel so isolated, so vulnerable to these creeps. Who was I going to call?

Certainly not the Sarnia police, that is for sure, ladies and gentlemen.

That was a quick road to hell, in my experience.

Just for the record. Yes, Willy and Squiggly, and Buddy Two-Shoes and Zoomer were in and out of my house. McNuggets offered to set up a grow-op, and was seriously disappointed when I said no. I said no, ladies and gentlemen. I wasn’t willing to risk my fucking house and my fucking pension over it—and social services fraud is a serious offence. That was my thinking, of course guys like that didn’t understand it. They’re guys with nothing to lose.

I still thought I did have something to lose.

I guess maybe I still had a lot to lose.

I had gotten so hungry, so desperate, that I started working for my brother, two hours here, four hours there…I had some hopes that this would get the creepy neighbours off my back, naturally they just assumed it was all more criminal stuff, or something. Like when I scraped up every nickel and every dime, after six or eight months of ten bucks an hour, and bought myself a little General Motors S-15, a club-cab, V-6 little pickup truck.

When I asked the ODSP for the proper forms to report income as a business, they started in and I endured two and a half years of bureaucratic harassment from them…

It just went on, and on, and on. They didn’t want to give me the proper forms, they wanted me to use the little thingy that comes in the mail, where there is no provision to claim allowable deductions for things like mileage, tools, work clothes. In my mind, all of this shit was somehow related, but of course there was no way in hell to prove it, and no one else was ever going to investigate it.

Letters to the editor ain't going to help you. Left, the county bucket, right, the courthouse.

You can write letters to the editor all day long, no one cares.

So. In documents submitted to the court by Sarnia Police, it was stated that I was ‘paranoid and delusional, dangerous and out of control, and an unexploded bomb waiting for a chance to happen’. In other words, just plain bullshit, and yet it does have a way of taking away all credibility, any realistic hope for defense against a charge that was already pretty bogus to begin with.

The judge asked who had made this diagnosis.

I yelled, “My fucking neighbour, that’s who—”

And they all laughed, and the court moved on…

It cost me a couple of grand in legal fees. I sold my house and moved back in with my old man. During the nine months I was out on bail, I suffered anxiety attacks, real bad ones, which I had never suffered before, and I have never suffered since. I was afraid to go anywhere alone, for fear of running into Mr. K, my name for this fucking goof, and having him make a hurried phone call to the Sarnia cops and I just felt so defenseless.

Truth is, he didn’t even have to see me around—but luckily, he didn’t have the nerve just to make something up, which would have worked well enough at this point. His worry there would be that I might be sitting around a dinner table, with a bunch of people the cops couldn’t marginalize, and then his own bullshit story would have begun to unravel.

Hell, even the cops aren’t that stupid. Seriously, they might have caught on. In about a million years.

Otherwise, I would have been back behind bars in a heartbeat. I have no illusions about this piece of human filth having any kind of a conscience. I know better than that, and that goes for the cops, the courts and the social workers as well. Even my so-called psychiatrists weren’t even half the man I was, and quite frankly, there was no hope they would ever become so. If that sounds like sour grapes, well. Why not? What else did you expect?

You still expect me to like you, after all of this bullshit. It’s just like that scene in Catch-22…yeah, you’re just trying, ever so hard, to help me.

Just a crummy little truck. It was all held against me, of course.

I had no rights at all, and that is especially true once the cops have transported you to the loonie bin once or twice. Talk about insidious. Trust me, those guys really know what they’re doing when they set out to destroy, absolutely destroy someone…

So, the police take you out of their holding cell, and take you to the county bucket. You are processed, where I was inspired enough to mention the word ‘suicide’, and why not?

I was pretty depressed by this point, and they stuck me in the hospital wing of four cells.

It was later that evening when they brought in Nick. Nick and two of his brothers had beaten a man to death in the south end of this city over some kind of a drug debt.

He was in the cell to my right…he was tall, well-built, long dark hair, and a warrior in some sense. These guys have never recognized the Crown. Can’t say as I blame them, on some level…

Three days later, it’s time for a bail hearing. They take you through a tunnel over to the court house, and into a holding cell with six or seven males in there…there’s a red-haired, blue-eyed guy, not all that unusual for a native guy, and this is another one of the brothers—he’s eyeballing me, sitting there on a bench, and he’s walking up and down the cell. Not a happy man, right. I had run into another guy that I actually knew, and we just kept talking to each other.

We’re trying to ignore this creep, who has some kind of burr under his saddle, and this is when the guards bring in the third brother. This guy is clearly native, Ojibwe, and he’s huge. Maybe not as tall as me, but holy, fuck, he’s three feet wide across the shoulders, he’s got legs like tree trunks, his chest gives the impression of being a foot and a half deep, front to back—you do not want to tangle with that guy. This is the third brother, all of them held in custody at various institutions, depending on where and when they were picked up. Let’s say one brother goes to trial first. Realizing he’s sunk, he cops a plea to a lesser charge, and off he goes to jail. The second brother comes to trial, and realizing he’s sunk, he also pleads to a lesser charge. This may sound pretty hard on the third brother, as they were all involved…and yet, they are also the only ones who know what really happened out there that night. Their lawyers may have talked back and forth, and while they were brothers, self-interest will also play a role. It always does—

So now, you’re in a holding cell with three killers.

Hiyee. Welcome to my court, where all are equal under the law.

With a good lawyer, I made bail. So did Gibby, my new buddy, and holy fuck, the next nine months were pretty bad. I sold my house, paid off my aunt, and ended up with $27,000.00 in my pocket, which wasn’t much consolation. All that really did was to drive the ignorant bitches downtown at the ODSP into a real frenzy of applied cruelty and quite frankly, these days I don’t talk to the fucking social workers any more than I have to.

I don’t have any good reason to talk to the cops. Maybe if I saw a house on fire, or a terrible accident, but it would have to be a good reason.

The last time I called the cops, I got nothing but shit out of it—we had a problem child in the building, a guy who pounded on things endlessly, and yet they never seemed to do much about it. Even the landlord didn’t do much about it. Fuck, I saw a vacant unit in the building and moved out from under the guy, and that is just the facts.

I did call the cops once, more recently—I would have preferred not to give my name, but with the modern cell-phone, you don’t have much choice if you do decide to call. Some guy, all addled up on strong dope and probably not taking his anti-psychotic meds was having some kind of an episode and I sort of felt I had no choice. I called it in, and pulled out of my parking spot, and got the hell out of there—if the cops are going to shoot some fucker in a bank lobby, at least it isn’t going to be me, ladies and gentlemen.

Owning a home was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and I will never get a chance to own a home again. Basically, this individual and I entered into a ‘bond at common law’, a so-called peace bond. The charge was withdrawn, and that was it, everyone was happy but me.

Like I said—it was all very educational.

As for having a little money, all you can do is ‘spend it down’ as best you can, all the while remembering that the ODSP can hit you with an ‘overpayment’, in which case, now you owe them a substantial sum of money, and in the end, you realize that the whole system is stacked against you.

After all of this, I went into the worst depression of my life. It went on for about a year and a half…the first thought I had upon waking up was I have to kill myself. The last thought that went through my head when I went to bed at night was I have to kill myself.

That is one hell of a way to live, ladies and gentlemen. If suicide, or attempted suicide, or threats of suicide are redirected aggression, and it probably is—yes, ladies and gentlemen, I really wanted to kill that little piece of shit, and one or two Sarnia cops as well. I had fantasies of driving my vehicle up the steps and into the front lobby of Sarnia Police Services, and make them kill me—suicide by cop, as it is called.

I have no idea, some years later, of how I managed to get real again. At some point it was over, and I could live again. I could breathe again…

Want to know something funny? I have no criminal record. For one thing, I wasn’t going to knuckle under to the likes of them, and secondly, my good name means a lot to me.

Take it or leave it.

It is what it is.

Going back to the quote at the end of the previous chapter, whether that’s accurate or not, I really can’t say. However, I have, absolutely for sure, rubbed shoulders with four genuine killers in my lifetime. That’s more than enough for me, thank you very much.

I guess I've rubbed shoulders with a few malignant little assholes as well.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his art on Fine Art America.

Check out One Million Words of Crap, an audio essay on independent, digital publishing, in celebration of fourteen years here at Long Cool One Books.

 

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content. 18+)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen. 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Three. 

Thank you for reading, and listening.

 

Robo-Coppage.

Techno Police 21. (Wiki.)

by Louis Shalako

The future is now.

Robot policing is already here.

“Police are already experimenting with robots, both armed and unarmed, and it’s only a matter of time before robots become standard in the surveillance, analysis and enforcement of crimes. They are never tired, irritable, in need of a break or biased, but neither are they able to take in the context of any given situation. Police know there is future for robotic law enforcement in traffic violations (for example, will a car’s onboard computer simply shut the vehicle down as soon as it starts speeding?), but how far will this extend? At what point is human instinct and judgment necessary in the enforcement of law or prevention of crimes? Is it most efficient to build a supposedly bias-free system of law that is responsible for determining, adjudicating and punishing crime?” Reilly Centre, Notre Dame.

I can only imagine how the bourgeoisie would feel if their $90,000 BMW, capable of 140 mph, shut down unexpectedly and when it was towed to a garage, they found out there was nothing wrong with it.

So that part is a bit overblown. Traffic chaos is counterproductive in economic terms, and the economy is the new God.

The most obvious use of robots, one that is already happening in the U.S. and Canada, is the use of drones or UAVs for police surveillance. UAVs are increasingly used for domestic police work in Canada and the United States: a dozen US police forces had applied for UAV permits by March 2013. Texas politician and commentator Jim Hightower has warned about potential privacy abuses from aerial surveillance. In February 2013, Seattle Mayor Michael McGinn responded to protests by scrapping the Seattle Police Department’s plan to deploy UAVs. (Wiki.)

The American Civil Liberties Union blog: Domestic Drones.

***

Driverless Cop Cars

Google’s driverless car might make a pretty good adjunct to more mundane domestic policing.

In this scenario, the driverless car simply sets up on the U-turn provisions that all divided highways have for emergency vehicle turnaround. Since there is no human driver to look out the window, the radar-gun is already deployed in the front windshield and with license-plate recognition software, offending drivers will receive their ticket by mail, and if they wish to dispute the ticket, they can attend court on the day appointed and, in Canada, argue it out with the Crown’s robot prosecutor and the robot-judge, which must sound very attractive to our presently very conservative government. In some jurisdictions people who run red lights are already subject to intersection surveillance cameras and ticketing. That one went through some debate locally and was shot down. They are legal in some places. (Trapster.) See also: Rutherford Institute.

Humanoid Robots sell Movie Tickets

I honestly think that humanoid robots like the sexy Peter Weller Robocop will definitely not be the norm. They do sell movie tickets. Modern film is geared to the mentality of ten year-olds.

Small, tracked or six-wheeled autonomous robots are much more likely because bipedal locomotion will be seen as unnecessary and it takes up a lot of computing power.

The psychological effect of a big red robot Mountie cannot be overlooked, and there will probably be a few of them purchased, to stand out in front of the Parliament buildings—tourists will love getting their pictures taken beside them of course; and in a real emergency, their memory banks will be downloaded looking for terrorist suspects. The metal and high-temperature plastic of their bodies will mean that in a fire or explosion, a human perpetrator taking a hostage, they can intervene quickly while regular (warm-blooded) police are still in transit.

Here’s some video of DARPA’s police robot. A humanoid robot is not completely useless, people may be more inclined to obey orders from something recognizable, as opposed to a box on wheels or tracks.

In the film ‘Fifth Element’ starring Bruce Willis, Mila Vovovich and Gary Oldman, there is a scene where a robotic insect penetrates security, complete with camera and microphone pick-up.

Steve Juvetson. (Wiki.)

The president smashes it with his hand or something. But in surveillance, penetrating people’s homes to eavesdrop, or better yet, clinging to a window and picking up conversations through the vibrations of the glass, seems a pretty likely scenario.

Here’s Mythbusters' Adam Savage with his new spider robot. (Youtube.) This one’s pretty big, but with miniaturization and nanotech, the new police ‘bugs’ would be quite small, and to the human eye, indistinguishable from a real insect.

When you consider just how murky convenience store and gas station security camera pictures usually are, and yet when you consider just how many convictions are obtained with what may be the only piece of evidence in a particular case, one would think that the camera and microphone technology would have to be vastly improved. Yet people are shooting some pretty good pics and videos on their smart-phones, and this is a mass-produced commercial application.

The cop-bugs will be state of the art where essentially cost is no object and the middle-class will no doubt support their use because after all, it’s not their kids doing hard time on evidence that would have been inadmissible a few short years previously. By the time they figure out their mistake, it will of course be too late.

Sooner rather than later, robotic snakes will be crawling through the drain pipes and up into the bathroom, and who knows, maybe right up the old wazoo.

Robot Prison Guards

The Republic of South Korea has already rolled out their first robotic prison guards. At a cost of $879,000 each, they’re not exactly cheap, but with mass production and economies of scale, the price will quickly come down. Here in Canada, a brand-new police officer starts off at about $78,000 a year in salary. They get other benefits as well, bringing the total up to about $100,000 a year in costs per officer. Prison guards don’t get quite that much, but it’s still expensive. It is also easy to see that a robot with a one-time cost of perhaps $300,000 would, over the life of the product, result in some real cost savings.

Robot guards can’t be bribed to bring in guns, drugs or smokes—a pack of smokes is real currency in a jail and I’ve heard some astronomical prices for two or three smokes in a jail setting, i.e., fifteen bucks for three smokes. Inmates tear them apart and roll them up in smaller cigarettes and according to one source, ‘That’s your smoking for the day.’

Robot guards would have no resentment and at least on some theoretical level, would have no reason to mistreat prisoners, would have no bigotry in the sense that they wouldn’t care about your skin colour, the nature of your offence, and all that sort of thing. They would also have no reason to look the other way, (paperwork being the bane of existence in bureaucratic systems) and would simply record everything for future reference.

They are also completely incapable of showing kindness or mercy to an inmate, something often overlooked in the sales brochures.

In a medical or psychological emergency, all the robots could do would be to call for human intervention, and in the prison setting, in the future, warm bodies of an official nature will be in short supply. Standard prison models in Canada, using modern prison design, use a minimal two officers per shift to supervise up to 192 inmates. With robot guards, inmate suicide numbers would probably see an increase in the number of fatalities.

In the movie, ‘Robocop,’ when two thugs grabbed a woman for a little ‘rape-party,’ Robocop intervened and the audience cheered. When he shot one of them in the balls, the audience clapped and applauded.

That’s what the cheerleaders for robotic policing want you to see, and to think about the coming robotic revolution in policing, a revolution that has already seen the first shots fired.

But there is a dark side, and that dark side of law enforcement stems from the current social and political climate, not just in the U.S., and the U.K., where they also have a Conservative government as we do in Canada.

Perhaps Bill Moyers said it best:

"The Unfinished Work of America"

Bill Moyers

“In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.”

“I should make it clear that I don’t harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy.  Remember, I worked for Lyndon Johnson.  Nor do I romanticize ‘the people.’ You should read my mail and posts on right-wing websites.  I understand the politician in Texas who said of the state legislature, “If you think these guys are bad, you should see their constituents.”

“But there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens (something otherwise known as social justice) and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud.  That can be the difference between democracy and plutocracy.”

“Toward the end of Justice Brennan’s tenure on the Supreme Court, he made a speech that went to the heart of the matter.  He said: ‘We do not yet have justice, equal and practical, for the poor, for the members of minority groups, for the criminally accused, for the displaced persons of the technological revolution, for alienated youth, for the urban masses…Ugly inequities continue to mar the face of the nation. We are surely nearer the beginning than the end of the struggle.’”

“And so we are. One hundred and fifty years ago, Abraham Lincoln stood on the blood-soaked battlefield of Gettysburg and called Americans to ‘the great task remaining.’  That ‘unfinished work,’ as he named it, remained the same then as it was when America’s founding generation began it. And it remains the same today: to breathe new life into the promise of the Declaration of Independence and to assure that the Union so many have sacrificed to save is a union worth saving.” Naked Capitalism.

The Dark Side of Automated Policing

We are well on the way down that road to the dark side.

Nowhere in the Constitution, in the U.S. or Canada, does it say that you have to have employment to have the rights of a citizen. There is no litmus test in terms of income or property. A lot of people don’t get that, and if they do, they simply don’t care.

What is disturbing, and this is not just in the U.S., is the amount of ignorance, prejudice and bigotry still present in the system.

The loudest mouths, and those with the biggest war-chest for lobbying, will have their way with society.

The future of law-enforcement is very bright. For the citizens, the future will be very dark indeed if that is allowed to go on without some checks and balances in the system.

The right to be left alone is one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Constitution.

You might as well forget it, that one is long dead.

You Won't Need a Warrant for That

"Have no doubt: the Fourth Amendment is fast becoming an artifact of a paper-based world.”

"The core idea behind that amendment, which prohibits the government from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ is that its representatives only get to invade people's private space -- their ‘persons, houses, papers, and effects’ -- after it convinces a judge that they're up to no good. The technological advances of the last few decades have, however, seriously undermined this core constitutional protection against overzealous government agents, because more and more people don't store their private information in their homes or offices, but on company servers.”

Consider email.

“In a series of rulings from the 1970's, the Supreme Court created ‘the third-party doctrine.’ Simply stated, information shared with third parties like banks and doctors no longer enjoys protection under the Fourth Amendment. After all, the court reasoned, if you shared that information with someone else, you must not have meant to keep it private, right? But online almost everything is shared with third parties, particularly your private e-mail.”

Even weirder still: in the future, people who appear to be doing nothing at all will become suspicious.

Surely you have something better to do. It's unnatural to be doing nothing at all.

Surely you must be up to something.

We will no longer have the right to be left alone.

Our world will not be destroyed by terrorism, it will not be destroyed by socialism, or communism, or any of the other ‘isms’ that we all love to talk about as if we actually knew something about it.

“We simply must have order.” This phrase has justified more ignorant laws than any other single thing I can think of.

In Canada, fifteen people can successfully lobby the government for a law that applies to all.

And if one kid is killed by a drunk driver, new calls for ‘tougher laws’ dominate the front pages of our newspapers and the letters to the editor, and they are all nice, well-meaning folks doing all the screaming and the yelling.

Our world will be destroyed by our own lack of perspective, our own intolerance, our own strident calls that ‘something must be done about it.’

The world will be destroyed by our own sanctimony.

And the meek, and their heavily-armoured and highly-paid protectors, shall inherit the Earth.

And when that happens, the safest place to be will be behind bars.

END

Author’s Note. A story like this takes a few hours to compile and write commentary, as well as reading the material, (research) and finding suitable pictures, links, etc.

Regarding the image 'Techno Police 21,' according to Wiki the image is too small and such a low resolution that the income potential of the copyright holder is not infringed by its use.

While the internet is a great equalizer, (and money isn’t everything) the author appreciates your support. To show that support, a reader might make a donation, check out one of my books and stories on Amazon or any other fine online bookstore, leave a rating, write a review, or even just leave a comment, which adds weight and authority to the blog under Google’s new semantic search algorithm.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Louis Shalako.

The Thought Police.

Courtesy C.I.A.

by Louis Shalako

Thought police may not be too far off into the future, and oddly, time-cops as well. Read the following passage very carefully and you’ll see they use the term ‘future crime.’

(Cops are already solving crimes long in the past. They do it in the present moment, not by time-travel.)

“The National Institute of Justice defines predictive policing as ‘taking data from disparate sources, analyzing them and then using the results to anticipate, prevent and respond more effectively to future crime.’ Some of these disparate sources include crime maps, traffic camera data, other surveillance footage and social media network analysis. But at what point does the possibility of a crime require intervention? Should someone be punished for a crime they are likely to commit, based on these sources? Are police required to inform potential victims?* How far in advance can crimes be forecasted?”

They also mention ‘social media network analysis.’ (See: intelligence-gathering network.)

Preventive policing sort of ignores any presumption of privacy on the part of the individual.

There are those who will say, “Well, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.”

Let’s extend that.

“If you aren’t thinking anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about…”

This is the door the thought police come in, isn’t it? They might even kick it in.

The right to privacy of our own thoughts is now open to question.

The future is already here, for we have had instances of crime prevention when cops get a tip that someone is threatening someone through the use of social media. If an arrest is made, a future crime may well have been prevented.

But in the broader sense of the article preventive policing takes a lot of numbers from a lot of places.

It assigns weights or values to each factor that goes into any person’s make-up at any given time.

Over the course of our life, our circumstances change, and so would our ‘personal algorithm.’

The risk factors change, and at some point in our life we may have reached a low point. This can be measured against a previous high point, a threshold of danger or risk may be reached, and a little bell goes off down at police headquarters.

If our subject, a guy called Edwin, living in Lincoln, Nebraska, has a personal algorithm, one based on all the data that can be gathered from monitoring his social interactions, using biometric recognitions and mood analyses from gas station security cameras, from his shopping habits, from recognizing his license plate at stop-light intersections, from semantic analyses of his postings on Facebook, by key-word recognition, the thought police might very easily determine that Edwin is ‘at risk’ to offend against the municipal, state, or federal laws.

Every little thing Edwin says is being taken down so that it can be used against him, but the cops are just doing their jobs, right?

They may determine on an intervention. They may wish to prevent him from assaulting his ex-girlfriend, or from committing suicide, or robbing a bank or starting up a meth lab or violating any other recognizable statute.

What if Edwin has a history of alcoholism and the cops are notified that he just bought and insured a vehicle? 

Maybe he’s been seen at a gas station, not too far from the liquor store?

Maybe they should put a car nearby and take a look at Edwin?

A lot of nice, well-meaning, thoughtful people would even applaud that. They might stop Edwin from going head-on into a minivan with a mother and four children in it later that night.

Sounds like a good idea, right?

Unfortunately, he hasn’t actually done anything yet. He’s merely ‘at risk’ and arguably others are at risk from Edwin—in the future. Maybe. Maybe even most likely.

The legislation which enables preventive policing has carefully written clauses regarding how an offender poses a ‘public or private menace,’ or whatever.

What are you going to do with Edwin?

Are you going to sentence him to thirty days in the county bucket?

Are you going to stick him in with other offenders of a more serious nature? Is his cell-mate a member of a drug-running bike gang? Is he a thief, a con-artist, does he grow dope, does he run illegal aliens over the border?

Edwin will be exposed to more criminality. Jail has been called a university of crime.

Will you take Edwin to the hospital for a period of observation?

Will a court order him to attend to a psychiatric or other program, one designed to help at-risk future offenders to work through their issues and move on with their lives in a more positive direction?

How are you going to pay for all of that?

And how is Edwin going to like being grabbed, losing his job, consequently losing his home, and ending up on the street because someone decided that he was a risk? Even though he never actually did anything? 

Except be an alcoholic, buy a car and get some gas, bearing in mind that he’s upset with his ex-girlfriend?

If he gets desperate enough, out there on the street, he might just remember that he had a cell-mate that promised to set him onto something good, some easy money kind of operation and Edwin might not have much going for him to begin with, and so he might just look his new friend up.

What’s really terrifying is the combination of privatized prisons, shrinking state budgets, the need to keep all those beds filled in a private jail to keep profits flowing to shareholders, and there have already been abuses.

Throw mandatory-sentencing legislation into the mix and some robot guards, and you have a potent brew.

That’s because we have different levels of crime, and therefore we must have different levels of future crime. 

The corollary of this would be different levels of punishment.

The lowest level is simple larceny—and stealing someone’s lawn mower is somehow seen as less serious when compared to sticking up a gas station attendant with a shot-gun in his face and running off with the proceeds.

Higher levels of crime (and punishment) involve assault, murder, and there is the whole range of crime from prostitution, domestic abuse, kidnapping, extortion, counterfeiting. The whole list.

Here’s where Edwin’s personal algorithm comes into play again.

If Edwin’s prior history includes assault, and maybe he got picked up with a weapon when he was prohibited from owning one, maybe he’s been convicted once or twice for little things, then the charge of the possible future crime he is being accused of being potentially able of maybe committing someday becomes more serious.

A conviction, would lead to a more serious sentence, wouldn’t it, or at least shouldn’t it? By any rational measure…?

And a simple psychiatric intervention would involve a longer period of observation, wouldn’t it, if the signs were serious enough, and if the risk to some other person was considered great enough, and if Edwin under further examination did not prove amenable to suggestion or did not sort of give all the right answers.

Who is going to pay for all the extra beds in local hospitals? Or special wards in local jails?

The goal of predictive policing is of course to prevent Columbine-style massacres and terrorist attacks, but it involves monitoring and profiling an entire population of individuals at all times.

Where do you set the filter? In other words, when do you cut it off as not serious enough and just ignore it?

And wouldn’t that cut-off itself be abused, in a particularly bigoted jurisdiction, to take all the wrong sort of people off the street, so nice people could ‘feel safe’ in their own neighbourhoods, or maybe to take one racial group off the streets so they would no longer compete for unskilled jobs with poor folks of the dominant race?

That’s already being done now, isn’t it, in some jurisdictions?

In my opinion the best cops have no hate in them, no bigotry, no prejudice. But there’s nothing to stop a bigot from joining the force and working his way up in it.

There's nothing to stop a bigot from running for sheriff or being elected governor, or even president.

No one has ever successfully managed to legislate for enlightenment, but then, no one has ever successfully legislated against prejudice and bigotry.

***

Preventive policing might even work, in that you would get arrests, and in the case of would-be terrorists, you might even find a truckload of explosive all ready to go, and a group or individual all set to carry out some plan.

In that sense, it would have been a success. That success would get high praise in the media.

Google has launched semantic search,** and I just read Facebook*** is doing heavy research into artificial intelligence, using the vast quantities of data they have gathered from us, quite frankly.

Semantics is the analysis of meaning. Artificial intelligence would use semantics to determine meaning, and with all the world now wired through a number of networks, using our phones, our devices, computers, automobile navigation systems, surveillance cameras, and a whole host of other sources of information, artificial intelligence will be used in preventive policing because it would require an almost infinite amount of manpower just to crunch the numbers and interpret data.

Preventive policing requires software and computer time, lots of it.

While a light might come on or a buzzer might sound on some police dispatcher’s board somewhere when Edwin tripped the threshold on his own personal algorithm, it is not quite clear whether the local police would consider it a high priority.

As long as people still had rights, they could always get a lawyer after some period of incarceration, or ‘observation,’ or even ‘treatment,’ and come back with a successful suit in a court of law.

My personal opinion is that the enabling legislation would have thought of that too—and done whatever was necessary to insulate the authorities from excessive responsibility for any mistakes that are made, or the inevitable civil and human rights violations that will surely occur.

But when you realize that most at-risk people really don’t have the resources to defend themselves in the first place, nor the resources to come back later, nor even to appeal ‘a wrongful conviction’ while they sit in a jail and rot—how in the hell that would ever be proven is also a good question—then a vast prison population composed of ‘at-risk’ individuals like Edwin doesn’t seem all that far-fetched.

It is almost a law of technology that all really revolutionary technologies bring disruption, they cause great and often unforeseen changes in the social context.

The infrastructure is already in place. It’s just a matter of time before this happens to some extent.

END

*Are police required to notify future victims?

What about potential future perps? Would a record of warnings or tickets be kept, and of course wouldn’t that also bear on the future outcome of a charge of ‘being at risk of committing a future breach of statute law?’

We got us a real can of worms here, ladies and gentlemen.

**Semantic search tries to predict the subject’s intentions, which of course has wider applications.

***Artificial intelligence would be used to draw conclusions based upon semantics, which may be defined as meaning, and multiple layers of deeper meaning. In the psychological sense, social theory would be used to define ‘at-risk’ indicative factors in any one person’s algorithm based upon past statistical analyses of individuals within social groups.

When these theories are based both on statistics and bigotry, ‘poverty breeds crime,’ for example, the possibility of abuse arises.