PredPol (now renamed Geolitica) built racial profiling and class profiling AI software and then sold it to police departments along with policing and behavioral “recommendations” that included harassment of entire communities.

Markup reporting (includes data visualization): https://themarkup.org/prediction-bias/2021/12/02/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-new-data-shows-it-perpetuates-them

Gizmodo story here: https://gizmodo.com/crime-prediction-software-promised-to-be-free-of-biases-1848138977

Markup article outlining their methodology for how they analyzed this data: https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2021/12/02/how-we-determined-crime-prediction-software-disproportionately-targeted-low-income-black-and-latino-neighborhoods

This story broke at the end of last year and I somehow missed it.

The founders of Geolitica / PredPol have known their software racially profiled since an independent study was published in 2018. They declined to update their algorithm, and withheld the information from police departments they sold their software to.

Link to independent study showing clear racial and class bias of Geolitica’s PredPol AI: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8616417

The author’s of the study even provided Geolitica with potential fixes to the algorithm. The company declined to implement these fixes because the fixes would have decreased the amount of racial profiling recommendations (ie “cRiMe pReDicTiOns”)

Even worse, a number of police departments were still using this software at the time the report broke.

:acab-3: :acab:

There is a ton of information in all of these reports and it’s worth reading through separate from my summary, more high lights in the comments. Incredible journalism from Gizmodo and The Markup.

  • Jadzia_Dax [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Holy shit the LAPD just had an insecure link to an open cloud storage drive filled with all the data for the LAPD and dozens of other departments.

    This means that PredPol (now renamed Geolitica), was not segmenting user data between regions and departments.

    Reports "Found on the Internet"

    We found the crime predictions for our analysis through a link on the Los Angeles Police Department’s public website, which led to an open cloud storage bucket containing PredPol predictions for not just the LAPD but also dozens of other departments. When we downloaded the data on Jan. 31, 2021, it held 7.4 million predictions dating back to Feb. 15, 2018. Public access to that page is now blocked.

    PredPol has now renamed itself Geolitica. When asked for comment, the CEO tried to get the reporters to use a different, pre-curated, data set instead. When the journalists declined, he ghosted them lol

    PredPol, which renamed itself Geolitica in March, criticized our analysis as based on reports “found on the internet.” But the company’s CEO did not dispute the authenticity of the prediction reports, which we provided, acknowledging that they “appeared to be generated by PredPol.”

    We explained that we had already discovered date discrepancies for exactly 20 departments and were not using that data in our final analysis, and volunteered to share the analysis dates with him for confirmation. He instead offered to allow us to use the software for free on publicly available crime data instead of reporting on the data we had gathered. After we declined, he did not respond to further emails