Investigating Police Release Decisions with Neural Networks: A Deep Learning Approach to Marijuana Arrest Data
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study investigates the police treatment of individuals arrested for the possession of small quantities of marijuana in Toronto. Utilizing a dataset comprising 5226 observations, we analyze the factors that influence whether an arrestee is released with a summons. The dataset includes variables such as the arrestee's race, age, sex, employment status, citizenship status, the year of the arrest, and the number of police databases in which the arrestee's name appeared. A neural network model is developed to predict the likelihood of release based on these factors. Our findings indicate significant patterns and disparities, shedding light on the influence of demographic and socioeconomic factors on police decision-making. The results underscore the potential of machine learning models in uncovering biases and guiding policy reforms in the criminal justice system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.026 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".