From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

Policing and policy

From the course: Ethics and Law in Data Analytics

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Policing and policy

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- In this last video we're going to be talking about criminal justice issues and predictive policing, which you know from your labs in Mod One and you'll see in future labs that this can raise some concerns both in law and in ethics. Law enforcement agencies have long been trying to identify patterns in criminal activity in order to allocate resources more efficiently. Today, many police departments use sophisticated computer modeling to identify crime hot spots. One of the issues in this policy area is predictive policing, which is technically defined as quote, "Directed, information based patrol. "Rapid response supported by fact based "pre-positioning of assets. "And proactive, intelligence based tactics "strategy and policy." The data sets in criminal justice can be of poor quality and often are generated with subjective information such as discretion of officers and prosecutors. To prevent discriminatory practices in this area it is critical to eliminate data that serves as a proxy for race or poverty to ensure historical bias is not replicated in the algorithmic process. This is essential to ensure that the relationship between criminal justice organizations and communities is healthy. The same issues, lack of knowledge about data used and lack of transparency in the technology are repeated here and can and do generate community distrust and allegations of discriminatory practices by police. Interestingly, data from body cameras removes the subjectivity of traditional data points used here. There's work being done to make body camera data more searchable and interoperable with other systems and the White House Big Data Report makes a point of emphasizing the potential benefits of improvements here.

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