Senators Ask The DOJ To End Federal Funding For Predictive Policing Programs

Legal Issues

from the throwing-good-money-at-bad-ideas dept

Predictive policing programs were supposed to make police work smarter and more efficient. It was supposed to trim down on hours wasted where a police presence wasn’t needed and increase enforcement in areas where crime was a problem.

But it hasn’t done this. It hasn’t made cops smarter. It’s possibly just made them lazier. No longer do they have to leverage their own biases to engage in selective enforcement. Now, a computer does it for them, consuming reams of data generated by biased policing and churning out tech-y sounding things like “heat maps” that are little more the digital representations of officers’ own worst impulses.

Garbage in, garbage out. That’s been the reality of predictive policing. Every company that claims it has a solution refuses to understand that it’s the underlying data that’s faulty. You can’t limit biased policing when most of your input data was created by biased policing. It’s impossible, no matter how much time, money, or expertise you throw at the problem.

Maybe it’s time to stop throwing money at it. That’s the gist of the letter [PDF] sent to the DOJ by Senator Ron Wyden and signed by another half-dozen senators. Wyden has been pestering the DOJ about predictive policing for a few years now. But so far, the DOJ has shrugged off his requests for more information.

Wyden and Clarke led a letter to the Justice Department in 2021, seeking more information about whether the department funds predictive policing systems. In its reply nearly a year later, DOJ failed to answer nearly all of the members’ substantive questions, admitting it did not know how much federal grant money had been spent on predictive policing systems. 

Well, if the DOJ can’t be bothered to tally up what it’s spending on predictive policing, maybe it should just stop spending money on it, especially if it’s equally uninterested in determining whether or not the programs it’s subsidizing aren’t just exacerbating current biased policing problems.

Until DOJ can ensure that recipients of its grants are in compliance with Title VI, we demand that DOJ pause grants to state, tribal, and local law enforcement agencies that could be used to procure or implement predictive policing technologies (person-based or place-based). We also request that DOJ conduct a thorough inventory of all grants for these systems that it has made to law enforcement agencies since 2009.

Good luck with the compliance. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits the DOJ from funding programs that discriminate on the basis of race, ethnicity, or national origin, even unintentionally. The systems in use today would be unlikely to hit that low bar, as Wyden points out elsewhere in the letter:

Mounting evidence indicates that predictive policing technologies do not reduce crime. Instead, they worsen the unequal treatment of Americans of color by law enforcement. Predictive policing systems rely on historical data distorted by falsified crime reports and disproportionate arrests of people of color. As a result, they are prone to over-predicting crime rates in Black and Latino neighborhoods while under-predicting crime in white neighborhoods. The continued use of such systems creates a dangerous feedback loop: biased predictions are used to justify disproportionate stops and arrests in minority neighborhoods, which further biases statistics on where crimes are happening.

Since there’s no way to obtain clean data without years of serious reform and rigorous oversight, nearly any agency seeking to use these systems will find the data pool polluted by past policing problems. Considering how many agencies have been subjected to consent decrees for biased policing and other misconduct, the problem is common enough any use by these agencies should be considered a de facto violation of Title VI protections.

We’ll see what comes of this. The DOJ is being asked to do something. There’s no legislation preventing it from simply blowing off the suggestions of these senators. Even with a more tolerant person heading the DOJ at the moment, the department is more likely to align itself with the nation’s law enforcement agencies than persistent senators or the millions of Americans the DOJ is actually supposed to be serving.

Filed Under: civil rights, discrimination, doj, predictive policing, ron wyden