Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by Sarah Brayne: “The scope of criminal justice surveillance has expanded rapidly in recent decades. At the same time, the use of big data has spread across a range of fields, including finance, politics, healthcare, and marketing. While law enforcement’s use of big data is hotly contested, very little is known about how the police actually use it in daily operations and with what consequences.

In Predict and Surveil, Sarah Brayne offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies, leveraging on-the-ground fieldwork with one of the most technologically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-the Los Angeles Police Department. Drawing on original interviews and ethnographic observations, Brayne examines the causes and consequences of algorithmic control. She reveals how the police use predictive analytics to deploy resources, identify suspects, and conduct investigations; how the adoption of big data analytics transforms police organizational practices; and how the police themselves respond to these new data-intensive practices. Although big data analytics holds potential to reduce bias and increase efficiency, Brayne argues that it also reproduces and deepens existing patterns of social inequality, threatens privacy, and challenges civil liberties.

A groundbreaking examination of the growing role of the private sector in public policing, this book challenges the way we think about the data-heavy supervision law enforcement increasingly imposes upon civilians in the name of objectivity, efficiency, and public safety….(More)”.

Digital Government Index (DGI): 2019

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

OECD Report by Barbara Ubaldi, Felipe González-Zapata & Mariane Piccinin Barbieri: “The Digital Government Index 2019 is a first effort to translate the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPG) into a measurement tool to assess the implementation of the OECD Recommendation on Digital Government Strategies and benchmark the progress of digital government reforms across OECD Member and key partner countries. Evidence gathered from the Survey on Digital Government 1.0 aims to support countries in their concrete policy decisions. The policy paper presents the overall rankings, results and key policy messages, and provides a detailed analysis of countries’ results for each of the six dimensions of the OECD Digital Government Policy Framework (DGPG)….(More)

Announcing the New Data4COVID19 Repository

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Blog by Andrew Zahuranec: “It’s been a long year. Back in March, The GovLab released a Call for Action to build the data infrastructure and ecosystem we need to tackle pandemics and other dynamic societal and environmental threats. As part of that work, we launched a Data4COVID19 repository to monitor progress and curate projects that reused data to address the pandemic. At the time, it was hard to say how long it would remain relevant. We did not know how long the pandemic would last nor how many organizations would publish dashboards, visualizations, mobile apps, user tools, and other resources directed at the crisis’s worst consequences.

Seven months later, the COVID-19 pandemic is still with us. Over one million people around the world are dead and many countries face ever-worsening social and economic costs. Though the frequency with which data reuse projects are announced has slowed since the crisis’s early days, they have not stopped. For months, The GovLab has posted dozens of additions to an increasingly unwieldy GoogleDoc.

Today, we are making a change. Given the pandemic’s continued urgency and relevance into 2021 and beyond, The GovLab is pleased to release the new Data4COVID19 Living Repository. The upgraded platform allows people to more easily find and understand projects related to the COVID-19 pandemic and data reuse.

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The Data4COVID19 Repository

On the platform, visitors will notice a few improvements that distinguish the repository from its earlier iteration. In addition to a main page with short descriptions of each example, we’ve added improved search and filtering functionality. Visitors can sort through any of the projects by:

  • Scope: the size of the target community;
  • Region: the geographic area in which the project takes place;
  • Topic: the aspect of the crisis the project seeks to address; and
  • Pandemic Phase: the stage of pandemic response the project aims to address….(More)”.

Using Collective Intelligence to Solve Public Problems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by The GovLab and the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta: “…The experience, expertise and passion of a group of people is what we call collective intelligence. The practice of taking advantage of collective intelligence is sometimes called crowdsourcing, collaboration, co-creation or just engagement. But whatever the name, we shall explore the advantages created when institutions mobilise the information, knowledge, skills and capabilities of a distributed group to extend our problemsolving ability. Smartphone apps like PulsePoint in the United States and GoodSAM in the United Kingdom, for example, enable a network of volunteer first responders to augment the capacity of formal first responders and give
cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to a heart attack victim in the crucial, potentially lifesaving minutes before ambulance services can arrive. Deliberative ‘mini-publics’, where a small group of citizens work face to face or online to weigh up the pros and cons of alternative policy choices, have helped governments in Ireland and Australia achieve consensus on issues that previously divided both the public and politicians. In Helsinki, residents’ involvement in crafting the city’s budget and its sustainability plan is helping to strengthen the alignment between city policy and local priorities.

Despite these successes, too often leaders do not know how to engage with the public efficiently to solve problems. They may run the occasional
crowdsourcing exercise, citizens’ jury or prizebacked challenge, but they struggle to integrate collective intelligence in the regular course of business.

Citizen engagement is largely viewed as a nice-to-have rather than a must-have for efficient and effective problem-solving. Working more openly and collaboratively requires institutions to develop new capabilities, change
long-standing procedures, shift organisational cultures, foster conditions more conducive to external partnerships, alter laws and ensure collective intelligence inputs are transparently accounted for when making decisions. But knowing how to make these changes, and how to redesign the way public institutions make decisions, requires a much deeper and more nuanced understanding….(More)”.

A New Normal for Data Collection: Using the Power of Community to Tackle Gender Violence Amid COVID-19

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Claudia Wells at SDG Knowledge Hub: “A shocking increase in violence against women and girls has been reported in many countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, amounting to what UN Women calls a “shadow pandemic.”

The jarring facts are:

  • Globally 243 million women and girls have been subjected to sexual and/or physical violence by an intimate partner in the past 12 months.
  • The UNFPA estimates that the pandemic will cause a one-third reduction in progress towards ending gender-based violence by 2030;
  • UNFPA predicts an additional 15 million cases of gender-based violence for every three months of lockdown.
  • Official data captures only a fraction of the true prevalence and nature of gender-based violence.

The response to these new challenges were discussed at a meeting in July with a community-led response delivered through local actors highlighted as key. This means that timely, disaggregated, community-level data on the nature and prevalence of gender-based violence has never been more important. Data collected within communities can play a vital role to fill the gaps and ensure that data-informed policies reflect the lived experiences of the most marginalized women and girls.

Community Scorecards: Example from Nepal

Collecting and using community-level data can be challenging, particularly under the restrictions of the pandemic. Working in partnerships is therefore vital if we are to respond quickly and flexibly to new and old challenges.

A great example of this is the Leave No One Behind Partnership, which responds to these challenges while delivering on crucial data and evidence at the community level. This important partnership brings together international civil society organizations with national NGOs, civic platforms and community-based organizations to monitor progress towards the SDGs….

While COVID-19 has highlighted the need for local, community-driven data, public health restrictions have also made it more challenging to collect such data. For example the usual focus group approach to creating a community scorecard is no longer possible.

The coalition in Nepal  therefore faces an increased demand for community-driven data while needing to develop a “new normal for data collection.”. Partners must: make data collection more targeted; consider how data on gender-based violence are included in secondary sources; and map online resources and other forms of data collection.

Addressing these new challenges may include using more blended collection approaches such as  mobile phones or web-based platforms. However, while these may help to facilitate data collection, they come with increased privacy and safeguarding risks that have to be carefully considered to ensure that participants, particularly women and girls, are not at increased risk of violence or have their privacy and confidentiality exposed….(More)”.

The State of Digital Democracy Isn’t As Dire As It Seems

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Richard Gibson at the Hedgehog Review: “American society is prone, political theorist Langdon Winner wrote in 2005, to “technological euphoria,” each bout of which is inevitably followed by a period of letdown and reassessment. Perhaps in part for this reason, reviewing the history of digital democracy feels like watching the same movie over and over again. Even Winner’s point has that quality: He first made it in the mid-eighties and has repeated it in every decade since. In the same vein, Warren Yoder, longtime director of the Public Policy Center of Mississippi, responded to the Pew survey by arguing that we have reached the inevitable “low point” with digital technology—as “has happened many times in the past with pamphleteers, muckraking newspapers, radio, deregulated television.” (“Things will get better,” Yoder cheekily adds, “just in time for a new generational crisis beginning soon after 2030.”)

So one threat the present techlash poses is to obscure the ways that digital technology in fact serves many of the functions the visionaries imagined. We now take for granted the vast array of “Gov Tech”—meaning internal government digital upgrades—that makes our democracy go. We have become accustomed to the numerous government services that citizens can avail themselves of with a few clicks, a process spearheaded by the Clinton-Gore administration. We forget how revolutionary the “Internet campaign” of Howard Dean was at the 2004 Democratic primaries, establishing the Internet-based model of campaigning that all presidential candidates use to coordinate volunteer efforts and conduct fundraising, in both cases pulling new participants into the democratic process.

An honest assessment of the current state of digital democracy would acknowledge that the good jostles with the bad and the ugly. Social media has become the new hotspot for Rheingold’s “disinformocracy.” The president’s toxic tweeting continues, though Twitter has attempted recently to provide more oversight. At the same time, digital media have played a conspicuous role in the protests following George Floyd’s death, from the phone used to record his murder to the apps and Google docs used by the organizers of protests. The protests, too, have sparked fresh debate about facial recognition software (rightly one of the major concerns in the Pew report), leading Amazon to announce in June that it was “pausing” police use of its facial recognition software for one year. The city of Boston has made a similar move. Senator Sherrod Brown’s Data Accountability and Transparency Act of 2020, now circulating in draft form, would also limit the federal government’s use of “facial surveillance technology.”

We thus need to avoid summary judgments at this still-early date in the ongoing history of digital democracy. In a superb research paper on “The Internet and Engaged Citizenship” commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences last year, the political scientist David Karpf wisely concludes that the incredible velocity of “Internet Time” befuddles our attempts to state flatly what has or hasn’t happened to democratic practices and participation in our times. The 2016 election has rightly put many observers on guard. Yet there is a danger in living headline-by-headline. We must not forget how volatile the tech scene remains. That fact leads to Karpf’s hopeful conclusion: “The Internet of 2019 is not a finished product. The choices made by technologists, investors, policy-makers, lawyers, and engaged citizens will all shape what the medium becomes next.” The same can be said about digital technology in 2020: The landscape is still evolving….(More)“.

The ambitious effort to piece together America’s fragmented health data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Nicole Wetsman at The Verge: “From the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, epidemiologist Melissa Haendel knew that the United States was going to have a data problem. There didn’t seem to be a national strategy to control the virus, and cases were springing up in sporadic hotspots around the country. With such a patchwork response, nationwide information about the people who got sick would probably be hard to come by.

Other researchers around the country were pinpointing similar problems. In Seattle, Adam Wilcox, the chief analytics officer at UW Medicine, was reaching out to colleagues. The city was the first US COVID-19 hotspot. “We had 10 times the data, in terms of just raw testing, than other areas,” he says. He wanted to share that data with other hospitals, so they would have that information on hand before COVID-19 cases started to climb in their area. Everyone wanted to get as much data as possible in the hands of as many people as possible, so they could start to understand the virus.

Haendel was in a good position to help make that happen. She’s the chair of the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), a National Institutes of Health program that works to improve collaboration and data sharing within the medical research community. So one week in March, just after she’d started working from home and pulled her 10th grader out of school, she started trying to figure out how to use existing data-sharing projects to help fight this new disease.

The solution Haendel and CD2H landed on sounds simple: a centralized, anonymous database of health records from people who tested positive for COVID-19. Researchers could use the data to figure out why some people get very sick and others don’t, how conditions like cancer and asthma interact with the disease, and which treatments end up being effective.

But in the United States, building that type of resource isn’t easy. “The US healthcare system is very fragmented,” Haendel says. “And because we have no centralized healthcare, that makes it also the case that we have no centralized healthcare data.” Hospitals, citing privacy concerns, don’t like to give out their patients’ health data. Even if hospitals agree to share, they all use different ways of storing information. At one institution, the classification “female” could go into a record as one, and “male” could go in as two — and at the next, they’d be reversed….(More)”.

Laboratories of Design: A Catalog of Policy Innovation Labs in Europe

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Anat Gofen and Esti Golan: “To address both persistent and emerging social and environmental problems, governments around the world have been seeking innovative ways to generate policy solutions in collaboration with citizens. One prominent trend during recent decades is the proliferation of Policy Innovation Labs (PILs), in which the search for policy solutions is embedded within scientific laboratory-like structures. Spread across the public, private, and non-profit sectors, and often funded by local, regional, or national governments, PILs utilize experimental methods, testing, and measurement to generate innovative, evidence-based policy solutions to complex public issues.

This catalog lists PILs in Europe. For each lab, a one-page profile specifies its vision, policy innovation approaches, methodologies, major projects, parent entity, funding sources, and its alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) call to action. For each lab we identify governmental, municipal, multi-sectorial, academic, non-profit, or private sector affiliation.

The goals of compiling this catalog and making it available to citizens, scholars, NGOs, and public officials are to call attention to the growing spirit of citizen engagement in developing innovative policy solutions for their own communities and to facilitate collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas between organizations. Despite their increasing importance in public policy making, PILs are as yet understudied. This catalog will provide an opportunity for scholars to explore the function and value of community-oriented policy innovation as well as the effects of approaching policy making around disruptive social problems in a “scientific” way.

Methodology: This catalog of policy innovation labs was compiled based on published reports, as well as a Google search for each individual country using the terms “policy lab” and “innovation lab,” first in English, then in the native language. Sometimes the labs themselves came up in the search results; for others, an article or a blog that mentioned them appeared. Next, each lab was searched specifically by name or by using an identified link. Each lab website that was identified was searched for other labs that were mentioned. Some labs were identified more than once, and a few that were found to be defunct or lacking a website were excluded. Innovation labs that referred only to technical or technological innovations were omitted. Only labs that relate to policy and to so-called “public innovation” were included in this catalog. Eligible PILs could be run and/or sponsored by local, regional, or national governments, universities, non-profit organizations, or the private sector. This resulted in a total of 212 European PILs.

Notably, while the global proliferation of policy innovation labs is acknowledged by formal, global organizations, there are no clear-cut criteria to determine which organizations are considered PILs. Therefore, this catalog follows the precedent set by previous catalogs and identifies PILs as organizations that generate policy recommendations for social problems and public issues by employing a user-oriented design approach and utilizing experimental methods.

Information about every lab was collected form its website, with minimal editing for coherence. For some labs, information was presented in English on its website; for others, information in the native language was translated into English using machine translation followed by human editing. Data for the catalog was collected between December 2019 and July 2020. PILs are opening and closing with increasing frequency so this catalog serves as a snapshot in time, featuring PILs that are currently active as of the time of compilation….(More)”.

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Marcella Alsan, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer, Minjeong Joyce Kim, Stefanie Stantcheva, and David Y. Yang: “The respect for and protection of civil liberties are one of the fundamental roles of the state, and many consider civil liberties as sacred and “nontradable.” Using cross-country representative surveys that cover 15 countries and over 370,000 respondents, we study whether and the extent to which citizens are willing to trade off civil liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the largest crises in recent history. We find four main results. First, many around the world reveal a clear willingness to trade off civil liberties for improved public health conditions. Second, consistent across countries, exposure to health risks is associated with citizens’ greater willingness to trade off civil liberties, though individuals who are more economically disadvantaged are less willing to do so. Third, attitudes concerning such trade-offs are elastic to information. Fourth, we document a gradual decline and then plateau in citizens’ overall willingness to sacrifice rights and freedom as the pandemic progresses, though the underlying correlation between individuals’ worry about health and their attitudes over the trade-offs has been remarkably constant. Our results suggest that citizens do not view civil liberties as sacred values; rather, they are willing to trade off civil liberties more or less readily, at least in the short-run, depending on their own circumstances and information….(More)”.

Inclusive Policymaking Tools: A COVID-19 Pandemic Case Study

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ans Irfan, Ankita Arora, Christopher Jackson and Celina
Valencia: “World Health Organization (WHO) estimates indicate the United States of America has the highest novel Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) burden in the world, with over 5 million confirmed cases and nearly 165,000 associated deaths as of August 14th, 2020 (WHO 2020). As the COVID-19 mortality and morbidity has disproportionately impacted populations who experience vulnerabilities due to structural issues such as racism (Laurencin and McClinton 2020; Lin II and Money 2020; Martin 2020; Kim et al. 2020), it has become increasingly necessary to take this opportunity and intentionally codify diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices in the policymaking process. To encourage and facilitate this, we synthesize existing literature to identify best practices that can not only be used to inform COVID-19-related public policy activities but will also continue to inform inclusive policymaking processes in the future. We identify specific tools for policymakers at all levels of government to better operationalize the DEI framework and enact inclusive, equitable public policies as a result….(More)”.