Working Paper: NBER ID: w30170
Authors: Sara B Heller; Benjamin Jakubowski; Zubin Jelveh; Max Kapustin
Abstract: This paper shows that shootings are predictable enough to be preventable. Using arrest and victimization records for almost 644,000 people from the Chicago Police Department, we train a machine learning model to predict the risk of being shot in the next 18 months. Out-of-sample accuracy is strikingly high: of the 500 people with the highest predicted risk, almost 13 percent are shot within 18 months, a rate 128 times higher than the average Chicagoan. A central concern is that algorithms may “bake in” bias found in police data, overestimating risk for people likelier to interact with police conditional on their behavior. We show that Black male victims more often have enough police contact to generate predictions. But those predictions are not, on average, inflated; the demographic composition of predicted and actual shooting victims is almost identical. There are legal, ethical, and practical barriers to using these predictions to target law enforcement. But using them to target social services could have enormous preventive benefits: predictive accuracy among the top 500 people justifies spending up to $134,400 per person for an intervention that could cut the probability of being shot by half.
Keywords: machine learning; gun violence; predictive modeling; social services
JEL Codes: C53; H75; I14; K42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Machine learning model predictions (C52) | Shooting victimization (K42) |
| Historical arrest and victimization records (K42) | Machine learning model predictions (C52) |
| Machine learning model predictions (C52) | Risk of future victimization (K42) |
| Predictions (C53) | Demographic composition of predicted victims (J11) |
| Machine learning model predictions (C52) | Preventive interventions (I12) |