Poor Chicago! Home at one point or another to Al Capone, Barack “Stalin” Obummer, Hitlary “Cankles” Clinton, Rahm “Sleazy” Emanuel, and other noxious criminals. So it’s no wonder the city has “become an incubator for experimental policing techniques,” including “an algorithm-generated list identifying people most likely to be involved in a shooting. The hope was that the list would allow police to provide social services to people in danger, while also preventing likely shooters from picking up a gun.”

That’s creepy enough, but it gets worse: “...the list’s algorithm identifies people by looking not only at arrests, but also whether someone is socially connected with a known shooter or shooting victim. The program also has a kind of pre-crime feature in which police visit people on the list before any crime has been committed.”

You almost feel sorry for the unelected murderers: not only do cops pester them, but “Social workers would show up, too — employees of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group at John Jay College. The list was designed to let Chicago police engage with at-risk (and potentially dangerous) citizens, but also to provide social services, such as access to counseling, to people who were in danger.” I’d pay money to watch these smug academics confront the streetwise and violent. Yo, Hollywood: here’s your next reality show.

“‘We want to show them the carrot and the stick,’ said Christopher Mallette, executive director of the Chicago Violence Reduction Strategy group… ‘We want them to know they can get help — but we also want them to know that if they don’t keep in line, there’s a jail cell waiting for them.'”

Talk about your empty threats! “Cankles” Clinton has pulled off more murders than any of Chicago’s homicidal maniacs, and she’s still rampaging about the country.

At any rate, Chicago’s foray into “pre-crime” has–shock, shock!–done nothing but increase the State’s power:

… a new report from the RAND Corporation … indicates that the list is, at best, not even as effective as a most wanted list. At worst, it unnecessarily targets people for police attention, creating a new form of profiling. … the program has saved no lives at all. … CPD [Chicago Police Department] wasn’t using the list as a way to provide social services; instead, CPD was using it as a way to target people for arrest.

Obviously, if Chicago’s rulers were truly serious about preventing murders, they’d reinstate the God-given right to self-defense that they stole from the serfs. But as Mark Luedtke, who alerted me to this story, would say, “No surprise” that they haven’t.

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