Through the Watts uprisings, Black America sent a message to white America: We’re fed up. We’re tired of racism, discrimination, and police brutality. White Americans, however, saw Watts as confirmation of their prejudiced belief that Black people are lawless and violent. For the President’s Crime Commission, White America’s vision of the Watts uprisings put a face to the problem the president called on them to solve—a problem that they felt required an extraordinary remedy. They found great potential in the new computing technologies that had already revolutionized war and national defense. Computing held so much promise that in the spring of 1966, following the Watts uprisings, Johnson added the Science and Technology Task Force to the Commission to introduce new computational solutions to crime. The president justified the task force’s work by pointing to computing technology’s success in war, national defense, and space exploration:
The scientific and technological revolution that has so radically changed most of American society during the past few decades has had surprisingly little impact upon the criminal justice system. In an age when many executives in government and industry, faced with decision making problems, ask the scientific and technical community for independent suggestions on possible alternatives and for objective analyses of possible consequences of their actions, the public officials responsible for establishing and administering the criminal law … have almost no communication with the scientific and technical community. More than two hundred thousand scientists and engineers are helping to solve military problems, but only a handful are helping to control the crimes that injure or frighten millions of Americans each year.
While the president and the Commission held great hope for the solutions the Science and Technology Task Force would produce, they placed their hopes more specifically in the one man whom they appointed to lead it: Saul I. Gass.
Gass was a mathematician and operations research pioneer. In 1958 he wrote the first textbook on linear programming—a mathematical modeling technique that seeks to (in large part) influence human behavior by quantifying and understanding the linear relationships between variables. Gass went to work for IBM in 1960 as project manager for the company’s contract to develop the real-time computational systems needed for Project Mercury, the United States’ first manned space mission. By 1965, when the president appointed Gass to lead the Science and Technology Task Force, Gass was managing all of IBM’s federal system projects. By heading the task force, Gass signaled his agreement with the Johnson administration that policing was the institution best equipped to solve America’s crime problem—and therefore developed—the Police Beat Algorithm. The Police Beat Algorithm was designed to address two broad planning questions. First, how should police departments equitably divide the geographic and demographic parameters of a municipal area? (Gass focused on “urban” areas based on population, crime levels, and demographic factors.) Second, how should police departments effectively deploy police resources (people, weapons, vehicles, etc.) based on these geographical divisions? Interestingly, Gass frequently highlighted the need to solve these problems in order to develop “contingency riot and other emergency plans”—a growing concern directly tied back to Watts and similar uprisings.