CT Blue

A while back I wrote some posts inspired by a history of the Gilded Age, my main point being that we’re reliving that era now in many respects. I don’t think I mentioned that during that age the South, particularly, came up with various ways to criminalize being black. It was one of many ways that blacks were, among other things, disenfranchised, since the Southern states passed laws disenfranchising people convicted of crimes. It’s a practice that continues today. It was also a way to keep many black men in a legal state of bondage.

The North was by no means innocent of this sort of thing, though the process was a tad subtler up here, and it also continues today.

The latest twist has a Philip K. Dickish quality to it.. A company called Predpol is selling software to police departments that predicts where crimes are likely to take place. It uses the garbage in-garbage out approach. The likelihood of a crime being committed in a given area is a function of the past crimes committed in that area, which is itself a function of the past focus by police on said area. As the linked article reports, corporate boardrooms are not included in the data, and we all know they are high crime areas. So, since past arrests have been heavily influenced by racist policing, minority areas show up as likely areas for future crimes to be committed, so police concentrate their policing there, which leads to ever more arrests in minority areas. The likelihood of a black person being arrested for a relatively trivial offense becomes far greater than the likelihood that a white person will be arrested for committing the same trivial offense. Of course, no one could have predicted such a thing would happen.

On the bright side, some police departments have either rejected the software or stopped using it, in the latter case because concerned groups shone a light on the practice. On the dark side, some police departments are using the software without even telling their local governmental bodies they are doing so.

Just another example of how racism is firmly embedded in our institutions, often in ways that we can’t see or appreciate.

By the way, I highly recommend the Motherboard site, where I saw the linked article. Computer related news with a decided liberal bias, just like facts.