preview

Essay On Predictive Policing

Decent Essays

From citizens capturing incidents of police brutality on their smartphones to police departments using surveillance drones, technology is changing our relationship to the law. Preventive policing is the newest aspect of law enforcement that acts as a deterrent rather than a reaction.
I think predictive policing and using analytics to analyze crime data is going to be a part of the way that policing is done. I think it would be absurd for police departments to not use the data that they possess to reduce crime. Any paranoia of the situation turning into the Minority Report is absurd. However, I hold some reservations about the software. Moving forward, what’s relevant is the way the software is deployed. Police officers must be trained to use …show more content…

With that said, I am not saying that predictive policing should replace other policing programs. Police still need to form relationships with communities, address problems of implicit bias, and use other methods to determine how to best deploy their resources. The use of data, like the use of any tool, leaves openings for misuse, but police departments must take steps to protect these civil liberties.
My concern comes in when police officers get into police officer mode where they sort of been enabled by a computer program to look for criminality. They’ve been told by a computer, “hey something might happen here” so when they see someone walking down the street, they’re halfway to probable cause before anything is happening.
There is certainly a racial bias component to the way predictive policing operates. You can have racism without racists. For example, maybe an algorithm will be seeing black people commit crimes disproportionately, so that gets ingrained. But race is probably not a factor causing crime; that higher crime rate could be the result of the impoverished neighborhoods, which are disproportionately populated by black people.
So, while the algorithm sorts it as “black” =>

Get Access