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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Police Tech Isn’t Designed to
Be Accurate -- It’s Made to Exert Social Control</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">James Kilgore
- December 16, 2023<br>
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<p>In the past 15 years, policing has grown its reach,
largely through an array of technologies that record
and store our personal details and daily activities.
Using algorithms and other formulae, authorities are
able to repurpose data to meet the emerging demands of
the criminal legal and immigration systems. From
predictive policing to GPS-enabled ankle monitors to
gunshot trackers to massive interlinked databases,
police are extending their capacity to track and
control. But in recent years, communities, researchers
and activists have begun to build a critique of these
technologies. Their critique may ultimately take us
well beyond liberal notions of privacy to address
fundamental questions of political power and freedom.</p>
<h2><strong>Predictive Policing</strong></h2>
<p>One key target has been predictive policing.
Implemented as early as 2008, predictive policing
gathers data on incidents of crime and people who
commit crime to predict future events and trends. Over
the years, various versions of this policing
technology, such as LASER or Hot Spot, have proven
problematic. The most recent exposé of this widely
used technology surfaced in an October 2023 <a
href="https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes?utm_source=TMP-Newsletter&utm_campaign=ea6b675321-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_10_03_11_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5e02cdad9d-ea6b675321-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D"
moz-do-not-send="true">piece</a> by Aaron Sankin and
Surya Mattu, published jointly by <em>The Markup</em>
and <em>Wired</em>. The authors’ findings revealed
that the policing technology of the widely contracted
company Geolitica (formerly PredPol) had a success
rate of less than 1 percent in its mission of
predicting the time and place of a crime. Drawing on
more than 23,000 predictions from 360 <a
href="https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2023/10/02/how-we-assessed-the-accuracy-of-predictive-policing-software"
moz-do-not-send="true">locations</a> in Plainfield,
New Jersey, the authors found a success rate of 0.6
percent for burglary and 0.1 percent for assaults and
robberies. Part of the reason for these disastrous
results was a statistical model which yields a large
number of predictions in the hope of capturing at
least some crime incidents in their net — a little
like buying 1,000 lottery tickets in the hopes of
getting at least one winner, regardless of how much is
lost along the way.</p>
<p>Predictive policing algorithms also incorporate
racial bias, often directing law enforcement to
communities already rife with police, surveillance and
high arrest rates. The Electronic Frontier Foundation
describes predictive policing as a “self-fulfilling
prophecy,” meaning that if authorities direct more
police to an area or at a targeted group, police will
make more arrests there regardless of the presence of
crime.</p>
<p>The shortcomings of predictive policing led
Plainfield authorities to follow in the footsteps of
Los Angeles and other former clients of Geolitica and
cancel their contract. Los Angeles’s cancellation grew
out of a campaign led by the Stop LAPD Spying
Coalition, whose activists revealed the racist bias in
the technology’s predictions and the false logic of
the company’s <a
href="https://stoplapdspying.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Before-the-Bullet-Hits-the-Body-Report-Summary.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true">claim</a> that “criminal
offenders are essentially hunter-gatherers; they
forage for opportunities to commit crimes.”</p>
<h2><strong>GPS Monitoring</strong></h2>
<p>Studies of GPS-enabled electronic monitors reveal
patterns of inaccuracy. In 2023, a data scrape led by
freelance data journalist Matt Chapman <a
href="https://thetriibe.com/2022/11/many-on-house-arrest-in-cook-county-bombarded-with-texts-from-sheriffs-contractor/"
moz-do-not-send="true">uncovered</a> gross
inaccuracies in the pretrial GPS monitoring program in
Cook County, Illinois — the largest in the nation.
Chapman found the devices generated thousands of false
alerts, often leading to police raids and baseless
arrests. A separate 2021 Cook County <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22052939-presentation-gps-em-location-alert-analysis-nov-2021"
moz-do-not-send="true">study</a> concluded that 80
percent of the alarms for violation of electronic
monitoring rules were “false positives.” These false
alerts can have serious consequences. One respondent
described the trauma of receiving six texts per day
over a period of 18 months that delivered false alerts
about alleged electronic monitoring violations. One of
those false alerts led to a two-day stint in jail. His
fate was not unique. <em>Truthout</em> has talked
with dozens of people across the country who have been
wrongly sent back to prison after their “tracking”
device reported that they were located several blocks,
even several miles, away from where they actually
were. One Chicago woman told us that a false alert led
to her arrest. She subsequently fell in her jail cell,
fractured her jaw and needed surgery when she was
released.</p>
<h2><strong>Gunshot Trackers</strong></h2>
<p>SoundThinking (formerly ShotSpotter) is a detection
technology that claims to track and trace the sounds
of gunshots in urban areas. But <a
href="https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-algorithm-technology-police-crime-7e3345485aa668c97606d4b54f9b6220"
moz-do-not-send="true">studies</a> in several of the
more than 100 cities where SoundThinking has contracts
paint an alarming picture of inaccuracy. Despite
complaints that false alerts disproportionately target
Black and Brown neighborhoods, most decision-makers
maintain their infatuation with the product. For its
part, SoundThinking remains content with business as
usual. In over 20 years of operation, the company has
not <a
href="https://www.macarthurjustice.org/shotspotter-generated-over-40000-dead-end-police-deployments-in-chicago-in-21-months-according-to-new-study/"
moz-do-not-send="true">produced</a> a single
scientific study testing how reliably their technology
can tell the difference between the sound of gunfire
and other loud noises. Instead, the company
aggressively defends the secrecy of their product
design. When a SoundThinking alert in Chicago led to
the arrest of an individual, the company refused a
court order to bring forward evidence of how it
assessed gunshot sounds. The firm chose instead to
accept a <a
href="https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/shotspotter-held-in-contempt-of-court/"
moz-do-not-send="true">contempt of court</a> charge.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has pledged to not renew
the city’s contract with SoundThinking in 2024. City
leaders in Dayton, Atlanta and Seattle have taken
similar steps by recently blocking or <a
href="https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2023/07/18/why-dayton-quit-shotspotter-a-surveillance-tool-many-cities-still-embrace/"
moz-do-not-send="true">ending</a> SoundThinking
contracts.</p>
<h2><strong>Other Technologies</strong></h2>
<p>Racial bias has surfaced in other technologies, most
notably in <a
href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRUEVYndh9c"
moz-do-not-send="true">facial recognition apps</a>
that have led to the misidentification, and in some
cases arrest, of at least six Black men in a number of
cities including Detroit, New Orleans and Baltimore.
Moreover, a 2023 New Orleans <a
href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/31/new-orleans-police-facial-recognition-00121427"
moz-do-not-send="true">study</a> contended that this
technology fell short in proponents’ claims to be able
to solve crime.</p>
<p><a
href="https://pretrialrisk.com/the-danger/impacts-of-biased-risk-assessments/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Risk assessment tools</a>
that build algorithms based on data from racist
criminal legal institutions and social service
agencies have also come under fire from several
scholars and researchers arguing that they wrongly
classify people’s suitability for pretrial release or
the appropriateness of a sentence.</p>
<h2><strong>Less Regulated Than Toasters</strong></h2>
<p>Part of the explanation for these inaccuracies lies
with the failure to adequately test these technologies
before marketing. While toaster producers must conform
to stringent <a
href="https://www.itcindia.org/iec-60335-2-9-particular-requirements-for-toasters/"
moz-do-not-send="true">regulations</a> and subject
their products to rigorous testing, in the high-stakes
world of policing, producers often get a free pass.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Many of these technologies simply have no place in
a world that respects life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The only technical requirement for an electronic
ankle monitor at the national level is an optional set
of <a
href="https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/249810.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true">standards</a> produced in
2016 by the National Institute of Justice requiring a
geolocation accuracy of 98 feet. Most residences,
especially urban apartments, could not accommodate a
person who is 98 feet from the geolocator box. Hence a
miscalculation of 98 feet would register as a
violation of household restrictions.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Black computer scientist Joy Buolamwini
used <a
href="https://www.npr.org/2023/11/28/1215529902/unmasking-ai-facial-recognition-technology-joy-buolamwini"
moz-do-not-send="true">research</a> on her own face
to expose what she labeled the “coded gaze.” The coded
gaze refers to the data base of faces used to create
models for prediction. In Buolamwini’s assessment, the
database of faces for testing this technology is
disproportionately white and male, making the software
more likely to identify a face as white and male. In
fact, Buolamwini, who is a dark-skinned Black woman,
found that the technology could not even see her face,
apparently because she was out of the norm.</p>
<p>Rather than developing rigorous pre-marketing testing
protocols, as tech writer Dhruv Mehrota told <em>Truthout</em>,
these technologies “are tested in the field.” Dillon
Reisman, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union
of New Jersey’s Automated Injustice Project, <a
href="https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2023/10/02/predictive-policing-software-terrible-at-predicting-crimes?utm_source=TMP-Newsletter&utm_campaign=ea6b675321-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_10_03_11_07&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5e02cdad9d-ea6b675321-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D"
moz-do-not-send="true">told</a> <em>The Markup</em>
that all over New Jersey, companies are selling
“unproven, untested tools that promise to solve all of
law enforcement’s needs, and, in the end, all they do
is worsen the inequalities of policing and for no
benefit to public safety.”</p>
<p>Instead of providing test results, police technology
companies primarily rely on promoting individual <a
href="https://www.soundthinking.com/shotspotter-public-safety-results/?utm_term=gunshot%20detection&utm_campaign=Non-Branded+-+Services&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=8557512895&hsa_cam=19121679341&hsa_grp=142764973374&hsa_ad=655799149081&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-322691664378&hsa_kw=gunshot%20detection&hsa_mt=p&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gclid=Cj0KCQiAjMKqBhCgARIsAPDgWlzmZM6L0etGibUF2pGRpZ1udRlQsVxzQqefPjpZWY_5PXAoLnDV-CkaAkkSEALw_wcB"
moz-do-not-send="true">success stories</a> or
simplistically attributing reductions in crime and the
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1HbknbpFXQ"
moz-do-not-send="true">saving</a> of lives to the
presence of their technologies without considering
other factors. Dayton, Ohio-based human rights
activist Julio Mateo told <em>Truthout</em> that
SoundThinking tries “to play up the situations in
which these technologies help and try to make
invisible the times when people are searched and
traumatized.”</p>
<p>Companies and decision-makers seem not to consider
the opportunity costs or ancillary impact of using
these devices. For example, in voting for the
reinstatement of SoundThinking in New Orleans after a
two-year ban, Black city councilor Eugene Green <a
href="https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/31/new-orleans-police-facial-recognition-00121427"
moz-do-not-send="true">proclaimed</a>, “If we have
it for 10 years and it only solves one crime, but
there’s no abuse, then that’s a victory for the
citizens of New Orleans.” Like most supporters of
police technology, Green failed to acknowledge that
the financial and human resources devoted to
SoundThinking could have gone to programs proven to
prevent violence by providing direct benefits to
impacted populations in the form of services such as
mental wellness, after-school activities and job
training. Similarly, Green’s comments overlooked the
trauma of people subjected to repeated false alerts.</p>
<p>On the surface, these outrageous failures to test
police technologies without even the rigor demanded of
a toaster appear puzzling. We expect our phones,
laptops, tablets, and every other device we use to
meet a certain consumer standard. A cellphone that
consistently connected us to the wrong number or
jumbled the entries in our contact lists would have a
very short shelf life. But completely different
standards apply to technologies of control and
oppression, especially those that deal with Black
people and other marginalized populations.</p>
<h2><strong>Why the Paradox Continues</strong></h2>
<p>This apparent paradox exists for several reasons. At
a systems level, the decentralized structure of
policing and law enforcement facilitates the expansion
of these technologies. Local authorities typically
make their own decisions on surveillance and policing.
For the purveyors of these technologies, local
decision-making offers a huge and welcoming
marketplace. While cities like <a
href="https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/24/883107627/boston-lawmakers-vote-to-ban-use-of-facial-recognition-technology-by-the-city#:~:text=Gaming-,Boston%20Lawmakers%20Vote%20To%20Ban%20Use%20Of%20Facial%20Recognition%20Technology,inaccurate%20for%20people%20of%20color."
moz-do-not-send="true">Boston</a> and <a
href="https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/14/18623897/san-francisco-facial-recognition-ban-explained"
moz-do-not-send="true">San Francisco</a> have banned
facial recognition, most smaller jurisdictions lack
the technical expertise and resources to conduct
serious investigations into police technology. They
rarely have policies or research agendas to address
the potential perils of apps like facial recognition
or gunshot trackers. As a result, the main sources of
information for local government are frequently the
company representatives themselves. In many cases,
local police or sheriffs, operating through their own
networks, become the major promoters of these
technologies across regions, largely because they
enhance that image of the technical efficiency of
their operations.</p>
<p>The decentralized structure also makes mounting
national opposition campaigns more challenging,
especially since federal authorities have chosen not
to impose regulations. In fact, in many instances,
federal authorities promote such usage, offering free
access to surplus military equipment and invasive
surveillance technology through the <a
href="https://www.dla.mil/Disposition-Services/Offers/Law-Enforcement/Join-The-Program/"
moz-do-not-send="true">Law Enforcement Support
Office’s 1033</a> Program as well as <a
href="https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/does-your-local-government-have-black-budget-too#:~:text=Federal%20grants%20to%20local%20and,governments%20via%20opaque%20grant%20programs."
moz-do-not-send="true">grants</a> operating through
the Department of Homeland Security and National
Security Agency. As of 2021, more than 10,000 federal,
state and local law enforcement agencies were <a
href="https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/federal-militarization-of-law-enforcement-must-end"
moz-do-not-send="true">participating</a> in the 1033
Program. Further, the emergence of COVID-19 relief
funds through the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) <a
href="https://epic.org/two-years-in-covid-19-relief-money-fueling-rise-of-police-surveillance/"
moz-do-not-send="true">directed</a> new resource
flows to local authorities for police surveillance
technologies such as automatic license plate-readers,
facial recognition systems, gunshot detection programs
and phone hacking tools. President Joe Biden
encouraged such expenditures during an address to a
Gun Violence Prevention Task Force meeting in 2022, <a
href="https://epic.org/two-years-in-covid-19-relief-money-fueling-rise-of-police-surveillance/"
moz-do-not-send="true">urging</a> cities to purchase
“gun-fighting technologies, like technologies that
hears, locates gunshots so there can be immediate
response because you know exactly where it came from.”
The nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center <a
href="https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/EPIC-ARPA-Surveillance-Funding-Table.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true">estimated</a> that as of
September 2022, at least 70 local governments had
allocated ARPA funding to surveillance technology.</p>
<p>In addition to systemic factors, police technology
also requires a controlling narrative. What researcher
Evgeny Morozov calls <a
href="https://www.publicbooks.org/the-folly-of-technological-solutionism-an-interview-with-evgeny-morozov/"
moz-do-not-send="true">technological-solutionism</a>,
is essential to that narrative.
Technological-solutionism influences decision-makers
and thought leaders to ignore options for addressing
deep social problems like white supremacy or the need
to redistribute income and resources. Instead,
technological-solutionism recasts complex social
phenomena as “neatly defined problems with definite,
computable solutions or as transparent and
self-evident processes that can be easily optimized —
if only the right algorithms are in place!” In
contemporary capitalism such solutions enhance the
profits and the power of <a
href="https://hbr.org/2022/01/can-big-tech-be-disrupted"
moz-do-not-send="true">Big Tech</a> while making
claims to address inequities, particularly those based
on race. This obsession with technological solutions
dampens efforts at critique and provides space for
expanding or tweaking police technology. Moreover,
technological-solutionism has emerged amid a
fundamental restructuring of contemporary capitalism,
characterized by the rise of Big Tech and the
expansion of policing in all its forms. This
transformation has enabled a range of “solutions”
unimaginable less than two decades ago, including the
technologies discussed here.</p>
<h2><strong>We Desperately Need a New Framework for Tech</strong></h2>
<p>However, we are only in the early days of what I
refer to as “digital colonialism,” a period that began
with the launch of the first iPhone in 2007. In the
world of digital colonialism, solutions come from tech
giants like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta and Amazon.
In the manner of colonialists of the past, Big Tech
leads the establishment of a settler regime within the
unconquered territory of the digital world. The
companies set the rules, control the technology and
dictate the regime of accumulation. Like colonial
states, these powers value order and hierarchies based
on race, ethnicity and gender. Just as colonial states
offered the Bible, Western education and the products
of industrialization, so do Amazon and their ilk offer
the digital world of Chrome, cellphones and Uber in
exchange for the essential raw material for their
empire: data.</p>
<p>As immense as the data on current computer clouds may
seem, the colonial oligarchs are just starting to
figure out how to deploy artificial intelligence to
collect and use people’s data to both maximize their
profits and <a
href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/technology/ai-humanity.html"
moz-do-not-send="true">extend</a> the depth of
social control. Data from facial recognition, crudely
racist as it may be, is only beginning to intersect
with other punitive and controlling technologies.
While research has unearthed several of the
shortcomings of predictive policing and gunshot
locators, exposing these flaws represents only a baby
step on the path to challenging the immense power of
the digital monopolists.</p>
<p>For the moment, to borrow a <a
href="https://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lorde_The_Masters_Tools.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true">phrase</a> from Audre Lord,
critics are using the master’s tools to contest the
power of Big Tech. Like the first discoverers of gold
in South Africa, activists and researchers are
grabbing a few nuggets of consumer products while
handing over a lot more wealth in terms of biometrics
and other data. Transforming these power dynamics
won’t come from merely attacking the inaccuracies or
racial bias baked into modern surveillance and
policing. In fact, enhancing the technical capacity or
reducing the racial bias in these technologies may
only create more efficient punitive regimes.</p>
<p>Many of these technologies simply have no place in a
world that respects life. Databases have many uses,
especially in tracking climate change or air quality,
but only if informed by a social justice framework
that is not driven by profit nor dogmatic paradigms
that either deify or totally reject technology.</p>
<p>We remain a long way from putting such frameworks in
place. At a moment when the cutting-edge of technology
and surveillance and the world’s political acumen are
trained on Gaza, a tiny strip of land which is perhaps
the ultimate <a
href="https://www.versobooks.com/products/2684-the-palestine-laboratory"
moz-do-not-send="true">laboratory</a> for these
technologies, building that framework looms all the
more urgent.</p>
<p><em>Thanks to Teresa Barnes, Dhruv Mehrota, Matt
Chapman and Julio Mateo for providing the comments
and information used to compile this article. </em></p>
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