Policing and surveillance

Predictive policing is an object of major concern where police departments can predict hotspots for future crime, Minority Report-style. The consequences? Over-policing the neighborhoods of people of color, essentially exacerbating the existing situation.33

There is no narrative of AI gone bad that can be complete without mentioning Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (COMPAS). A ProPublica report34 analyzed the risk assessment algorithm, which predicts the risk of recidivism, and found it to be biased against black people35. There has been a lot written about automated decision-making in predictive policing and sentencing since COMPAS, but using computer vision-style surveillance approaches to determine criminality36 continues in one form or another. The Department of Homeland Security is using37 a terrorist-predicting algorithm that utilizes features such as age, address, destination and/or transit airports, trip information...