PredPol Quotes in Weapons of Math Destruction
These types of low-level crimes populate their models with more and more dots, and the models send the cops back to the same neighborhood.
This creates a pernicious feedback loop. The policing itself spawns new data, which justifies more policing. And our prisons fill up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes. Most of them come from impoverished neighborhoods, and most are black or Hispanic. So even if a model is color blind, the result of it is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.
Police make choices about where they direct their attention. Today they focus almost exclusively on the poor. […] And now data scientists are stitching this status quo of the social order into models, like PredPol, that hold ever-greater sway over our lives.
The result is that while PredPol delivers a perfectly useful and even high-minded software tool, it is also a do-it-yourself WMD. In this sense, PredPol, even with the best of intentions, empowers police departments to zero in on the poor, stopping more of them, arresting a portion of those, and sending a subgroup to prison. […]
The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair.
PredPol Term Timeline in Weapons of Math Destruction
