Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.

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Yeshimabeit Milner was in high school the first time she saw kids she knew getting handcuffed and stuffed into police cars. It was February 29, 2008, and the principal of a nearby school in Miami, with a majority Haitian and African-American population, had put one of his students in a chokehold. The next day several dozen kids staged a peaceful demonstration. It didn’t go well.

That night, Miami’s NBC 6 News at Six kicked off with a segment called “Chaos on Campus.” (There’s a clip on YouTube.) “Tensions run high at Edison Senior High after a fight for rights ends in a battle with the law,” the broadcast said. Cut to blurry phone footage of screaming teenagers: “The chaos you see is an all-out brawl inside the school’s cafeteria.”

Students told reporters that police hit them with batons, threw them on the floor, and pushed them up against walls. The police claimed they were the ones getting attacked—“with water bottles, soda pops, milk, and so on”—and called for emergency backup. Around 25 students were arrested, and many were charged with multiple crimes, including resisting arrest with violence. Milner remembers watching on TV and seeing kids she’d gone to elementary school with being taken into custody. “It was so crazy,” she says. 

For Milner, the events of that day and the long-term implications for those arrested were pivotal. Soon after, while still at school, she got involved with data-based activism, documenting fellow students’ experiences of racist policing. She is now the director of Data for Black Lives, a grassroots digital rights organization she cofounded in 2017. What she learned as a teenager pushed her into a life of fighting back against bias in the criminal justice system and dismantling what she calls the school-to-prison pipeline. “There’s a long history of data being weaponized against Black communities,” she says.

Inequality and the misuses of police power don’t just play out on the streets or during school riots. For Milner and other activists, the focus is now on where there is most potential for long-lasting damage: predictive policing tools and the abuse of data by police forces. A number of studies have shown that these tools perpetuate systemic racism, and yet we still know very little about how they work, who is using them, and for what purpose. All of this needs to change before a proper reckoning can take place. Luckily, the tide may be turning.

There are two broad types of predictive policing tool. Location-based algorithms draw on links between places, events, and historical crime rates to predict where and when crimes are more likely to happen—for example, in certain weather conditions or at large sporting events. The tools identify hot spots, and the police plan patrols around these tip-offs. One of the most common, called PredPol, which is used by dozens of cities in the US, breaks locations up into 500-by-500 foot blocks, and updates its predictions

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By: Niall Firth
Title: Predictive policing algorithms are racist. They need to be dismantled.
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/17/1005396/predictive-policing-algorithms-racist-dismantled-machine-learning-bias-criminal-justice/
Published Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2020 10:35:03 +0000

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