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.