Crime-Predicting Algorithm Outperforms Humans

Never quite understood the draw of headlines like this: "Human With Tool Outperforms Human Without Tool"<p>Yep. That's what humans do. Now, if you really want to catch my attention, give me a headline like this: "Humans Without Tool Completely Fail To Freak Out When New Tool Appears".

&#62; Where police used to sit in daily meetings to plan where to patrol, they can now spend more time actually out on patrol, since the computer's doing the planning.<p>While this is a nice application of machine learning, I can't help but wonder how much of their increase is due to the above fact.<p>Police being part bigger parts of their neighborhoods must be a non-negligible variable.

I wonder what the guy who police stopped from breaking into the empty house will do? Let's say the guy stopped from a burglary for some time. He doing it by choice for a reason (has no job, hungry, does not want a job, can't find one - could be many reasons). What he will do next? Will he go into different area or try something new like killing someone? The question is will this technology applied from only one side shift the crime distribution on the map or shift it on the type of crime distribution? The real problem is not addressed. Someone just try to make some money by providing symptomatic cure.

I wonder how log it'll be until "the bad guys" start stealing/sniffing/hacking/buying each days map from the cops, so they know where it's relatively safer to commit crime?

What will be said to those who claim racial profiling by these algorithms?