Week Five

I had absolutely no idea that cash-strapped police departments were using predictive programs to position cops in areas where more crime is predicted to happen. This seems like a good concept, and it is in a lot of ways, but it also appears to be an almost racist system. It doesn’t surprise any of us that there are more crimes reported from impoverished, “ghetto” communities that are often filled with people of color than in wealthier areas with residents who tend to be mostly white. Like O’Neil discusses in this chapter of her book, since more crimes are recorded in these areas, the predictive programs that police departments are using predict that the next crimes will be committed there as well. This leads to more patrols and searches in these neighborhoods, leading to more arrests and recorded crimes, and thus continuing this endless circle of discrimination and “our prisons fill[ing] up with hundreds of thousands of people found guilty of victimless crimes.” A quote pretty much summarizing this discussion that I absolutely love is, “geography is a highly effective proxy for race.” This was one of those things that when you read it you kind of do a double-take and think wow.

Another thing from this reading that jumped out at me was towards the end of the chapter when O’Neil says that ‘stop and frisk’ practices widely used today “may seem intrusive and unfair, but in short time… will also be viewed as primitive.” Finding out that police in San Diego are not only doing stop and frisks and asking for IDs, they are also taking photographs of these people and uploading them to this crime cloud facial recognition system. This seems like a huge invasion of privacy stacked on top of already unfair stop and frisk practices. I think that using facial recognition softwares to probe security footage and stuff like that for suspected criminals is a good thing, but taking pictures of people on the street simply because they might seem a little suspicious is a little extreme to me; and that’s saying a lot because I’m one of those people that doesn’t really care about their privacy all that much.