The software ID’d 28 current congressmembers as criminals. And if you’re cynically thinking, “I bet they were all people of color,” well … you’re not entirely wrong.
(To be fair, Lewis has been arrested for peaceful protests 45 times, according to his own count, most recently in 2013, but his mugshots weren’t included in the comparison set.)
The false matches were disproportionately of people of color, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, among them civil rights legend Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.). These results demonstrate why Congress should join the ACLU in calling for a moratorium on law enforcement use of face surveillance.
The Negatives of False Positives
While the federal government thus far hasn’t been eager to rein in local police departments when it comes to using new tech, the results of the ACLU’s experiment may spur more actual from those “crooks” in D.C.
It is quite clear that communities of color are more heavily and aggressively policed than white communities. This status quo results in an oversampling of data which, once used as inputs to an analytical framework leveraging artificial intelligence, could negatively impact outcomes in those oversampled communities. Even body cameras, which were originally intended to strengthen police accountability, could be used as a tool to surveil law-abiding Americans and potentially violate their fourth amendment rights. We are seriously concerned that wrong decisions will be made due to the skewed data set produced by what we view as unfair and, at times, unconstitutional policing practices.
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