By Nicholas West | 1 March 2018
BLACKLISTED NEWS — The concept of “policing in the 21st Century” is not only the implementation of a range of high-tech surveillance measures, including biometrics, but apparently also involves keeping it a complete secret from citizens … and even from their elected representatives.
At issue is one of the most controversial aspects of modern policing: the notion that if police can sweep all information into centralized databases and let an artificial intelligence algorithm do the investigative work of making connections in the data stream, then crimes can be prevented before they happen — pre-crime.
Despite an ongoing debate about potential errors in current systems, and even the legitimacy of predictive algorithms altogether (See: “Predictive Algorithms Are No Better At Telling The Future Than A Crystal Ball”), police departments across the nation are rolling out various versions of this technology. However, even worse than citizens apparently having little to no say about what their tax dollars are building, it is increasingly coming to light that these programs are being used without informing citizens at all.
I previously reported about the difficulty that journalists and activists have had in the notoriously police state infested Chicago, with the Chicago PD even refusing FOIA requests for details from well-known media like The Chicago Sun Times. […]
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