Also, certain crimes like drug use are common to the point where even models highlighting "links" or "suspects" purely at random might yield increased prosecutions if law enforcement believed in the model enough to investigate more thoroughly than they would if simply following a "hunch", carrying out random checks or conducting a "sweep of the area". And if a model is largely uncorrelated with actual rather than revealed propensity to commit crime, and rather more closely linked to demographics, then its effect on who police prioritise their resources chasing could be a big problem. Certainly a far more likely problem than a model failing to surface any evidence of any criminal activity.

For other reasons, criminals citing false negatives from limited social network based profiling tools failing to identify them as a gang member as a case for their defence, as the article suggested one New Orleans defendant hoped to do, would also be problematic.