Paper by Emile Loza de Siles: “In 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. foresaw the inevitability of society’s eventual triumph over the deep racism of his time and the stain that continues to cast its destructive oppressive pall today. From the pulpit of the nation’s church, Dr King said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice”. More than 40 years later, Eric Holder, the first African American United States Attorney General, agreed, but only if people acting with conviction exert to pull that arc towards justice. With artificial... (More >)
Counting Crimes: An Obsolete Paradigm
Paul Wormeli at The Criminologist: “To the extent that a paradigm is defined as the way we view things, the crime statistics paradigm in the United States is inadequate and requires reinvention….The statement—”not all crime is reported to the police”—lies at the very heart of why our current crime data are inherently incomplete. It is a direct reference to the fact that not all “street crime” is reported and that state and local law enforcement are not the only entities responsible for overseeing violations of societally established norms (“street crime” or otherwise). Two significant gaps exist, in that: 1)... (More >)
The 2021 Good Tech Awards
Kevin Roose at the New York Times: “…Especially at a time when many of tech’s leaders seem more interested in building new, virtual worlds than improving the world we live in, it’s worth praising the technologists who are stepping up to solve some of our biggest problems. So here, without further ado, are this year’s Good Tech Awards… To DeepMind, for cracking the protein problem (and publishing its work) One of the year’s most exciting A.I. breakthroughs came in July when DeepMind — a Google-owned artificial intelligence company — published data and open-source code from its groundbreaking AlphaFold project.... (More >)
“If Everybody’s White, There Can’t Be Any Racial Bias”: The Disappearance of Hispanic Drivers From Traffic Records
Article by Richard A. Webster: “When sheriff’s deputies in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, pulled over Octavio Lopez for an expired inspection tag in 2018, they wrote on his traffic ticket that he is white. Lopez, who is from Nicaragua, is Hispanic and speaks only Spanish, said his wife. In fact, of the 167 tickets issued by deputies to drivers with the last name Lopez over a nearly six-year span, not one of the motorists was labeled as Hispanic, according to records provided by the Jefferson Parish clerk of court. The same was true of the 252 tickets issued to people... (More >)
Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them
Article by Aaron Sankin, Dhruv Mehrotra for Gizmodo, Surya Mattu, and Annie Gilbertson: “Between 2018 and 2021, more than one in 33 U.S. residents were potentially subject to police patrol decisions directed by crime prediction software called PredPol. The company that makes it sent more than 5.9 million of these crime predictions to law enforcement agencies across the country—from California to Florida, Texas to New Jersey—and we found those reports on an unsecured server. The Markup and Gizmodo analyzed them and found persistent patterns. Residents of neighborhoods where PredPol suggested few patrols tended to be Whiter and more middle-... (More >)
How Courts Embraced Technology, Met the Pandemic Challenge, and Revolutionized Their Operations
Report by The Pew Charitable Trusts: “To begin to assess whether, and to what extent, the rapid improvements in court technology undertaken in 2020 and 2021 made the civil legal system easier to navigate, The Pew Charitable Trusts examined pandemic-related emergency orders issued by the supreme courts of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The researchers supplemented that review with an analysis of court approaches to virtual hearings, e-filing, and digital notarization, with a focus on how these tools affected litigants in three of the most common types of civil cases: debt claims, evictions, and child support. The key... (More >)
An Obsolete Paradigm
Blogpost by Paul Wormelli: “…Our national system of describing the extent of crime in the U.S. is broken beyond repair and deserves to be replaced by a totally new paradigm (system). Since 1930, we have relied on the metrics generated by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program to describe crime in the U.S., but it simply does not do so, even with its evolution into the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). Criminologists have long recognized the limited scope of the UCR summary crime data, leading to the creation of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and other supplementary crime... (More >)
When Machines Can Be Judge, Jury, and Executioner
Book by Katherine B Forrest on “Justice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”: “This book explores justice in the age of artificial intelligence. It argues that current AI tools used in connection with liberty decisions are based on utilitarian frameworks of justice and inconsistent with individual fairness reflected in the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It uses AI risk assessment tools and lethal autonomous weapons as examples of how AI influences liberty decisions. The algorithmic design of AI risk assessment tools can and does embed human biases. Designers and users of these AI tools have allowed some degree... (More >)
Manipulation As Theft
Paper by Cass Sunstein: “Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion share a different characteristic; they displace the choices of those whose lives are directly at stake, and who are likely to have epistemic advantages, with the choices of outsiders, who are likely to lack critical information. Kantians and welfarists should be prepared to endorse a... (More >)
Virtual Juries
Paper by Valerie P. Hans: “The introduction of virtual or remote jury trials in response to the COVID-19 pandemic constitutes a remarkable natural experiment with one of our nation’s central democratic institutions. Although it is not a tightly controlled experimental study, real world experiences in this natural experiment offer some insights about how key features of trial by jury are affected by a virtual procedure. This article surveys the landscape of virtual jury trials. It examines the issues of jury representativeness, the adequacy of virtual jury selection, the quality of decision making, and the public’s access to jury trial... (More >)
