Did you read the harrowing editorial Frizzelle posted to Slog this morning, written by a Santa Monica woman about cops who showed up at her door, guns drawn, after a neighbor called them and said she was a “Hispanic” thief? (She’s black. It was her own home.) That’s the kind of data set—911 calls to police—that Seattle police say they’re going to rely on to help determine deployments of police through their new Real Time Crime Center. The ACLU of Washington is pushing back, though, pointing out that the data is racially biased. I wrote about all this for the paper recently right here. Here’s what Jared Friend, the local ACLU’s director of technology and liberty, told me:
“The department needs to internalize that the data is inherently problematic, and it needs to think about ways to correct for those problems,” Friend said on his way out from the meeting [with SPD]. “And if the value of using this data isn’t really strong, and it’s outweighed by those concerns [about bias], they need to decide not to move forward with it. The good news, based on what I heard in the meeting, is that they’re willing to do that.”
Has SPD corrected course? I haven’t heard anything yet, but stay tuned.