Predictive Policing: A Work in Progress or a Problem in Action?
September 2, 2020
Amid this year’s protests of police brutality, makers of crime-predicting software took the occasion to promote their products as a solution to racial bias in law enforcement. The Markup ponders, “Data-Informed Predictive Policing Was Heralded as Less Biased. Is It?” Writer Annie Gilbertson observes, as we did, that more than 1,400 mathematicians signed on to boycott predictive policing systems. She also describes problems discovered by researchers at New York University’s AI Now Institute:
“‘Police data is open to error by omission,’ [AI Now Director Rashida Richardson] said. Witnesses who distrust the police may be reluctant to report shots fired, and rape or domestic violence victims may never report their abusers. Because it is based on crime reports, the data fed into the software may be less an objective picture of crime than it is a mirror reflecting a given police department’s priorities. Law enforcement may crack down on minor property crime while hardly scratching the surface of white-collar criminal enterprises, for instance. Officers may intensify drug arrests around public housing while ignoring drug use on college campuses. Recently, Richardson and her colleagues Jason Schultz and Kate Crawford examined law enforcement agencies that use a variety of predictive programs. They looked at police departments, including in Chicago, New Orleans, and Maricopa County, Ariz., that have had problems with controversial policing practices, such as stop and frisk, or evidence of civil rights violations, including allegations of racial profiling. They found that since ‘these systems are built on data produced during documented periods of flawed, racially biased, and sometimes unlawful practices and policies,’ it raised ‘the risk of creating inaccurate, skewed, or systemically biased data.’”
The article also looks at a study from 2016 by the Royal Statistical Society. Researchers supplied PredPol’s algorithm with arrest data from Oakland California, a city where estimated drug use is spread fairly evenly throughout the city’s diverse areas. The software’s results would have had officers target Black neighborhoods at about twice the rate of white ones. The team emphasized the documented harm over-policing can cause. The write-up goes on to cover a few more studies on the subject, so navigate there for those details. Gilberston notes that concerns about these systems are so strong that police departments in at least two major cities, Chicago and Los Angeles, have decided against them. Will others follow suit?
Cynthia Murrell, September 2, 2020
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