Transcripts For CSPAN QA Sarah Brayne Predict And Surveil 20

[captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] susan sarah brayne, your new book seems like it is welltimed for a National Debate on policing, but you tell readers youve been working on the project about a decade. How did you get started in this interest in big data and the police . Sarah when i was a phd student at princeton i think it was back in 2012, this is when there was the start of enthusiasm over big data was happening. People were saying big data is transforming everything from finance to sports to journalism, marketing, insurance, education. But no one was yet working on how big data would or would not transform the criminal Justice System. Id had a longstanding interest in the criminal Justice System and i started to ask, how are the police, courts, corrections, leveraging things like predictive algorithms and how is it changing daily operations . I quickly realized there was not actually ironically very good data on police use of big data, and thats when i decided to pursue an ethnographic study on that question. Susan we will have lots of time to explore the details, but what is the conclusion you came to after you spent this amount of time investigating the topic . Sarah the conclusion is basically that instead of thinking about data as some sort of objective or fundamentally unbiased tool, i think it is better to think about data as situated in social systems and organizations. Its like a form of capital, something that some people have more or less of, it can be used for different purposes and it has an increasing amount of value in organizations. It can be used to achieve different types of organizational goals. The book disabuses folks of the notion that data is an objective and unbiased force that can fix all of the problems that have existed for decades if not centuries. Susan in effect, it is a cautionary tale for people who are looking at the use of data to solve some of the policing problems the country is having. Sarah very much so. Susan you write that big data and the criminal Justice System motivates my work. First of all, define exact we what big data is. You talk about volume, velocity, and variety. What is big data . Sarah the three vs to pollute vsrs to the three typically refers to volume, meaning there is a lot of different pieces of data. Second, it has to do with variety. The data comes from a range of disparate institutional sources. The police have always collected their own crime data, for example, but increasingly the police are using information from a range of institutional sources, like private data brokers, social media data. That is the variety part of it. Velocity has to do with processing speed and sometimes Storage Capacity as well. That means you can run analysis on these vast troves of data that previously wouldve taken days or weeks, but with increasing computing power, we can run them almost instantaneously and often remotely as well. Susan why do you come to the conclusion that the u. S. Criminal Justice System is overgrown . Sarah sort of no matter how you measure it, the u. S. Criminal Justice System is unprecedented in size and scope, both in International Comparative perspective, looking at p renes at peer nations, but also historically. It has been on the rise since the 1970s. Also if we look at federal expenditures directed toward local Law Enforcement agencies or the number of cops on the street, the United States is without peer in terms of the size and scope of the criminal Justice System. Sometimes scholars talk about the phenomenon as mass incarceration, which has to do with not just the reach of who is behind bars but the families, communities, neighborhoods that are heavily surveilled and policed as well. Susan one statistic you give is that 70 million americans have a record on file with criminal justice agencies, that is out of a population of 330 million americans. Is that statistic a surprising one compared to other western nations . Sarah it is definitely very surprising and also surprising to the audiences i present to as well. Ive had many folks in the audience try to correct me on that, saying you must have an extra zero in there and that kind of thing. There is a tendency sometimes to think about involvement in the criminal Justice System as this sort of unusual or uncommon experience, whereas increasingly, particularly for certain demographic groups such as those with lower levels of Educational Attainment or racial minorities, involvement in the criminal Justice System is a modal life experience. I think it is a surprising statistic, particularly when you look in comparison to other countries with similar crime rates. Susan to write this book and do this research, you spent a lot of time in the field. Tell me about that experience. Sarah basically, as i mentioned, theres not very much data on police use of big data, so what that called for was what we call ethnographic fieldwork, which is talking to people, watching people as they go through their daily lives. I quickly realized i needed to get access to a Police Department, and i selected the lapd not because it is an average Police Department it is not, it is large and wellfunded but i selected it for those reasons, it is on the forefront of police use of Data Analytics and i thought it could broadcast some trends that could shape a smaller Police Departments in coming years. My fieldwork involved observations and interviews with sworn officers and civilian employees in different areas and specialized divisions of lapd. Things like the Information Technology division, records and identification, robbery , homicide, fugitive warrants. I also went on ride alongs and did some observations at the joint Regional Intelligence Center in southern california. For those who are not familiar, Fusion Centers are basically these multidisciplinary, multi agency surveillance organizations funded by the federal government, largely in the wake of 9 11, which was seen as an information sharing failure for the intelligence community. I also did interviews with folks who work at Key Technology companies who designed some of the Analytic Software the lapd uses. Those include things like palantir. Susan was your presence in the Police Department welcomed for the most part . Sarah thats an interesting question. I would say i was able to obtain a great degree of access, unprecedented in some ways. But there was a lot of variation in how i was received, i think. This is one of the things that this kind of Ethnographic Research exposes. Theres a lot of heterogeneity in Police Department. For those individuals who were very proud of how the department was using data, they consider themselves on the vanguard and leaders in the field, and they were excited to have me there and show me the new technological tools they had. But at the same time, historically police have not been particularly receptive to researchers or journalists spending time with them. There was a certain guarded mess a certain guardedness or resistance and other spaces where they were concerned i was going to do a hit piece on them, that i was going to come in and do a gotcha story and leave. I think the resistance to my presence declined the longer i spent in the field, because i was able to build some of those relationships and share my findings with the police themselves. There was also a lot of confusion about who i was, to be honest, in the field, because Police Department are very hierarchical organizations. If someone higher up would vouch for my presence, they would say to a sergeant, she is here. It is fine. Then the patrol officers would find that to be tolerable. But they often confused who i was. They would say, instead of saying i was a sociologist from princeton, they would be like, she is a psychologist from harvard or a senior from stanford and that kind of thing. There was definitely confusion about my presence in the field as well, particularly on ride alongs. Susan it was important to select lapd to be emblematic, as you said, of Police Departments, but how many Police Departments around the United States are actually using software and big Data Collection . Sarah unfortunately, i dont have the answer to that question. I think that is a fundamental problem when we are talking about, we are having nationwide conversations about what policing should and should not look like. There isnt any centralized data on this. There are some national surveys. The Law Enforcement management and Service Administration survey, but they are pretty out of date, it is voluntary compliance, and a lot of the time, the budgetary allocations to these kind of advanced technologies are pretty ambiguous. You cant necessarily always tell from a Police Budget amount of money is spent on this kind of thing. I think it would probably fall somewhere in the 70 range from what i have read, with the departments not using these kind of tools largely being small Police Department. The United States, another thing that is unique about the criminal Justice System, we have this federated system of policing where there are a lot of Police Departments that are extremely small, under 20 officers, and they lack the training, funding, infrastructure for these technologies. Susan one other question about your preparation and research, you founded something called the texas Prison Education initiative. What is it, and how did it inform your work on this topic . Sarah it is basically just a group of volunteer professors and graduate students, postdocs, and undergrads who volunteer to Teach College classes in prison. My was in graduate school, i started volunteer teaching in state prisons in new jersey, just volunteer Teaching College classes. When i moved to texas, which has one of the largest prison populations in the country, i figured the university here would similarly have some sort of Prison Ed Program to volunteer with. For me, it is important because that is my skill set around being an educator, and also i do research on the criminal Justice System. It seems unwise to have no exposure to folks whose lives are on the line in the system. There wasnt a Prison Education program at ut at the time. So along with a fellow graduate student, we founded the texas Prison Education initiative and now we offer College Credit covid, on pause due to to about 150 folks. Everything from sociology to physics, english, math. The courses are all for credit and available without cost to the students. Susan how did that work inform your conclusions on big data and policing . Sarah one of the things that came up that is informing my future research, is a lot of the time, there is a lack of knowledge or information among the folks incarcerated about the particulars of their case. Specifically the phase of police investigation. I would have students say things to me like my lawyer had no idea, my defense attorney had no idea the means by which i came under suspicion. They did not know why the cops were sitting outside my house that day. I think one of the things about big data policing is it is largely invisible. When we have a whole bunch of cops on the street, that is a very visible Police Presence you can understand and feel. Big data policing can be invisible. It is hard to put your finger on. What actually is going on in Police Investigative procedures is largely a black box. I think this exacerbates preexisting inequalities in the system. Susan you mentioned there was a big uptick following 9 11, when people began to see Police Departments around the country were bringing surplus military equipment into their use. That decision is being reexamined both at the state and national level. You write the creep of military software into Police Operations is largely overlooked. Why is that . Sarah i think it is precisely because it is so invisible. As you said, theres been increased attention about the militarization of policing, how Police Departments are getting surplus military kit, small, local Police Departments have tanks and that sort of thing. I think military software is this largely untold part of the story, where a lot of different techniques and platforms and algorithms that were initially designed for military applications are being imported into local policing. I think the reason we dont know much about it is because it is largely invisible. You can see a tank rolling down the street at the pumpkin festival in new hampshire, but you cant necessarily see they are using predictive algorithms. Susan Police Department have used data, even if it was manually collected, for a long time. Is the issue here that rather than reactive policing, solving a crime that has happened, it is the use of data to predict where crime might happen and how that is used, and whether it is used equally . Is that the question for society . Sarah i think that is one of the nubs of the question, weve had this shift from reactive to proactive policing. Another key transformation that is also occurring, as you said, the police have been long collecting their own data, but that is on people they have contact with. What is happening in the digital age is the police are increasingly collecting information on all of these folks who have no direct criminal justice contact. Part of that has to do with the variety component of the three vs of big data, that they are purchasing information from private companies. They are using tools like automatic license plate readers. You dont have to get pulled over for your data to be put in their system. That kind of information is also being used in the predictive modeling, for example. Susan tell me a little more about the companies you mentioned. The first is palantir technologies. What does it do for Police Departments . Sarah they actually just went public in september of this year, so there is a little more Information Available on them now than before, but when i started this fieldwork, very few people had heard of them. Essentially they have a platform that is called Palantir Gotham , where Law Enforcement agencies and other clients are able to aggregate all of these disparate sources of information and visualize them in certain ways. For example, the police might have their own crime data, but you can build out these networks where somebody at the center of the network might have direct Police Contact and be stopped by the police, for example, but there is a secondary Surveillance Network lets say i was stopped by the lapd , but you never have. But i called you on a phone and now your phone number is associated with it. Or i was parked outside of your house. Or it has information on who i am dating or who my siblings are or where i work. You have radiating out this secondary Surveillance Network of individuals who dont have any Law Enforcement contact. Thats one way you can use palantir to visualize different sources of data. It is also used for investigations. For example, there was an instance in which there was some copper wire theft going on in the city, and they were able to basically draw a radius in palantir, in the mapping function, and they were able to list the vehicles in the radius between midnight and 5 00 a. M. When they knew the wire theft had occurred, and narrow it down to three cars that mightve been involved in the crime. It is this very powerful Data Integration and surveillance tool that can yield insights that might have previously taken hundreds of detectives on a case, or weeks or months, and of this shoe leather policing, and you can use it to narrow to shorten that down to minutes. Susan people listening might say that sounds like a good thing, use less police resources. So where is the problem . Sarah i think the issue lies in the sense that, in order for the system to work perfectly, we have to assume infallibility of the state. That the state never makes mistakes, and the inferences one draws about why you are in a place at a given time are unbiased and without error. And that everybody entering the data there is still a human side of Copyright National<\/a> cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] susan sarah brayne, your new book seems like it is welltimed for a National Debate<\/a> on policing, but you tell readers youve been working on the project about a decade. How did you get started in this interest in big data and the police . Sarah when i was a phd student at princeton i think it was back in 2012, this is when there was the start of enthusiasm over big data was happening. People were saying big data is transforming everything from finance to sports to journalism, marketing, insurance, education. But no one was yet working on how big data would or would not transform the criminal Justice System<\/a>. Id had a longstanding interest in the criminal Justice System<\/a> and i started to ask, how are the police, courts, corrections, leveraging things like predictive algorithms and how is it changing daily operations . I quickly realized there was not actually ironically very good data on police use of big data, and thats when i decided to pursue an ethnographic study on that question. Susan we will have lots of time to explore the details, but what is the conclusion you came to after you spent this amount of time investigating the topic . Sarah the conclusion is basically that instead of thinking about data as some sort of objective or fundamentally unbiased tool, i think it is better to think about data as situated in social systems and organizations. Its like a form of capital, something that some people have more or less of, it can be used for different purposes and it has an increasing amount of value in organizations. It can be used to achieve different types of organizational goals. The book disabuses folks of the notion that data is an objective and unbiased force that can fix all of the problems that have existed for decades if not centuries. Susan in effect, it is a cautionary tale for people who are looking at the use of data to solve some of the policing problems the country is having. Sarah very much so. Susan you write that big data and the criminal Justice System<\/a> motivates my work. First of all, define exact we what big data is. You talk about volume, velocity, and variety. What is big data . Sarah the three vs to pollute vsrs to the three typically refers to volume, meaning there is a lot of different pieces of data. Second, it has to do with variety. The data comes from a range of disparate institutional sources. The police have always collected their own crime data, for example, but increasingly the police are using information from a range of institutional sources, like private data brokers, social media data. That is the variety part of it. Velocity has to do with processing speed and sometimes Storage Capacity<\/a> as well. That means you can run analysis on these vast troves of data that previously wouldve taken days or weeks, but with increasing computing power, we can run them almost instantaneously and often remotely as well. Susan why do you come to the conclusion that the u. S. Criminal Justice System<\/a> is overgrown . Sarah sort of no matter how you measure it, the u. S. Criminal Justice System<\/a> is unprecedented in size and scope, both in International Comparative<\/a> perspective, looking at p renes at peer nations, but also historically. It has been on the rise since the 1970s. Also if we look at federal expenditures directed toward local Law Enforcement<\/a> agencies or the number of cops on the street, the United States<\/a> is without peer in terms of the size and scope of the criminal Justice System<\/a>. Sometimes scholars talk about the phenomenon as mass incarceration, which has to do with not just the reach of who is behind bars but the families, communities, neighborhoods that are heavily surveilled and policed as well. Susan one statistic you give is that 70 million americans have a record on file with criminal justice agencies, that is out of a population of 330 million americans. Is that statistic a surprising one compared to other western nations . Sarah it is definitely very surprising and also surprising to the audiences i present to as well. Ive had many folks in the audience try to correct me on that, saying you must have an extra zero in there and that kind of thing. There is a tendency sometimes to think about involvement in the criminal Justice System<\/a> as this sort of unusual or uncommon experience, whereas increasingly, particularly for certain demographic groups such as those with lower levels of Educational Attainment<\/a> or racial minorities, involvement in the criminal Justice System<\/a> is a modal life experience. I think it is a surprising statistic, particularly when you look in comparison to other countries with similar crime rates. Susan to write this book and do this research, you spent a lot of time in the field. Tell me about that experience. Sarah basically, as i mentioned, theres not very much data on police use of big data, so what that called for was what we call ethnographic fieldwork, which is talking to people, watching people as they go through their daily lives. I quickly realized i needed to get access to a Police Department<\/a>, and i selected the lapd not because it is an average Police Department<\/a> it is not, it is large and wellfunded but i selected it for those reasons, it is on the forefront of police use of Data Analytics<\/a> and i thought it could broadcast some trends that could shape a smaller Police Department<\/a>s in coming years. My fieldwork involved observations and interviews with sworn officers and civilian employees in different areas and specialized divisions of lapd. Things like the Information Technology<\/a> division, records and identification, robbery , homicide, fugitive warrants. I also went on ride alongs and did some observations at the joint Regional Intelligence Center<\/a> in southern california. For those who are not familiar, Fusion Centers<\/a> are basically these multidisciplinary, multi agency surveillance organizations funded by the federal government, largely in the wake of 9 11, which was seen as an information sharing failure for the intelligence community. I also did interviews with folks who work at Key Technology<\/a> companies who designed some of the Analytic Software<\/a> the lapd uses. Those include things like palantir. Susan was your presence in the Police Department<\/a> welcomed for the most part . Sarah thats an interesting question. I would say i was able to obtain a great degree of access, unprecedented in some ways. But there was a lot of variation in how i was received, i think. This is one of the things that this kind of Ethnographic Research<\/a> exposes. Theres a lot of heterogeneity in Police Department<\/a>. For those individuals who were very proud of how the department was using data, they consider themselves on the vanguard and leaders in the field, and they were excited to have me there and show me the new technological tools they had. But at the same time, historically police have not been particularly receptive to researchers or journalists spending time with them. There was a certain guarded mess a certain guardedness or resistance and other spaces where they were concerned i was going to do a hit piece on them, that i was going to come in and do a gotcha story and leave. I think the resistance to my presence declined the longer i spent in the field, because i was able to build some of those relationships and share my findings with the police themselves. There was also a lot of confusion about who i was, to be honest, in the field, because Police Department<\/a> are very hierarchical organizations. If someone higher up would vouch for my presence, they would say to a sergeant, she is here. It is fine. Then the patrol officers would find that to be tolerable. But they often confused who i was. They would say, instead of saying i was a sociologist from princeton, they would be like, she is a psychologist from harvard or a senior from stanford and that kind of thing. There was definitely confusion about my presence in the field as well, particularly on ride alongs. Susan it was important to select lapd to be emblematic, as you said, of Police Department<\/a>s, but how many Police Department<\/a>s around the United States<\/a> are actually using software and big Data Collection<\/a> . Sarah unfortunately, i dont have the answer to that question. I think that is a fundamental problem when we are talking about, we are having nationwide conversations about what policing should and should not look like. There isnt any centralized data on this. There are some national surveys. The Law Enforcement<\/a> management and Service Administration<\/a> survey, but they are pretty out of date, it is voluntary compliance, and a lot of the time, the budgetary allocations to these kind of advanced technologies are pretty ambiguous. You cant necessarily always tell from a Police Budget<\/a> amount of money is spent on this kind of thing. I think it would probably fall somewhere in the 70 range from what i have read, with the departments not using these kind of tools largely being small Police Department<\/a>. The United States<\/a>, another thing that is unique about the criminal Justice System<\/a>, we have this federated system of policing where there are a lot of Police Department<\/a>s that are extremely small, under 20 officers, and they lack the training, funding, infrastructure for these technologies. Susan one other question about your preparation and research, you founded something called the texas Prison Education<\/a> initiative. What is it, and how did it inform your work on this topic . Sarah it is basically just a group of volunteer professors and graduate students, postdocs, and undergrads who volunteer to Teach College<\/a> classes in prison. My was in graduate school, i started volunteer teaching in state prisons in new jersey, just volunteer Teaching College<\/a> classes. When i moved to texas, which has one of the largest prison populations in the country, i figured the university here would similarly have some sort of Prison Ed Program<\/a> to volunteer with. For me, it is important because that is my skill set around being an educator, and also i do research on the criminal Justice System<\/a>. It seems unwise to have no exposure to folks whose lives are on the line in the system. There wasnt a Prison Education<\/a> program at ut at the time. So along with a fellow graduate student, we founded the texas Prison Education<\/a> initiative and now we offer College Credit<\/a> covid, on pause due to to about 150 folks. Everything from sociology to physics, english, math. The courses are all for credit and available without cost to the students. Susan how did that work inform your conclusions on big data and policing . Sarah one of the things that came up that is informing my future research, is a lot of the time, there is a lack of knowledge or information among the folks incarcerated about the particulars of their case. Specifically the phase of police investigation. I would have students say things to me like my lawyer had no idea, my defense attorney had no idea the means by which i came under suspicion. They did not know why the cops were sitting outside my house that day. I think one of the things about big data policing is it is largely invisible. When we have a whole bunch of cops on the street, that is a very visible Police Presence<\/a> you can understand and feel. Big data policing can be invisible. It is hard to put your finger on. What actually is going on in Police Investigative<\/a> procedures is largely a black box. I think this exacerbates preexisting inequalities in the system. Susan you mentioned there was a big uptick following 9 11, when people began to see Police Department<\/a>s around the country were bringing surplus military equipment into their use. That decision is being reexamined both at the state and national level. You write the creep of military software into Police Operations<\/a> is largely overlooked. Why is that . Sarah i think it is precisely because it is so invisible. As you said, theres been increased attention about the militarization of policing, how Police Department<\/a>s are getting surplus military kit, small, local Police Department<\/a>s have tanks and that sort of thing. I think military software is this largely untold part of the story, where a lot of different techniques and platforms and algorithms that were initially designed for military applications are being imported into local policing. I think the reason we dont know much about it is because it is largely invisible. You can see a tank rolling down the street at the pumpkin festival in new hampshire, but you cant necessarily see they are using predictive algorithms. Susan Police Department<\/a> have used data, even if it was manually collected, for a long time. Is the issue here that rather than reactive policing, solving a crime that has happened, it is the use of data to predict where crime might happen and how that is used, and whether it is used equally . Is that the question for society . Sarah i think that is one of the nubs of the question, weve had this shift from reactive to proactive policing. Another key transformation that is also occurring, as you said, the police have been long collecting their own data, but that is on people they have contact with. What is happening in the digital age is the police are increasingly collecting information on all of these folks who have no direct criminal justice contact. Part of that has to do with the variety component of the three vs of big data, that they are purchasing information from private companies. They are using tools like automatic license plate readers. You dont have to get pulled over for your data to be put in their system. That kind of information is also being used in the predictive modeling, for example. Susan tell me a little more about the companies you mentioned. The first is palantir technologies. What does it do for Police Department<\/a>s . Sarah they actually just went public in september of this year, so there is a little more Information Available<\/a> on them now than before, but when i started this fieldwork, very few people had heard of them. Essentially they have a platform that is called Palantir Gotham<\/a> , where Law Enforcement<\/a> agencies and other clients are able to aggregate all of these disparate sources of information and visualize them in certain ways. For example, the police might have their own crime data, but you can build out these networks where somebody at the center of the network might have direct Police Contact<\/a> and be stopped by the police, for example, but there is a secondary Surveillance Network<\/a> lets say i was stopped by the lapd , but you never have. But i called you on a phone and now your phone number is associated with it. Or i was parked outside of your house. Or it has information on who i am dating or who my siblings are or where i work. You have radiating out this secondary Surveillance Network<\/a> of individuals who dont have any Law Enforcement<\/a> contact. Thats one way you can use palantir to visualize different sources of data. It is also used for investigations. For example, there was an instance in which there was some copper wire theft going on in the city, and they were able to basically draw a radius in palantir, in the mapping function, and they were able to list the vehicles in the radius between midnight and 5 00 a. M. When they knew the wire theft had occurred, and narrow it down to three cars that mightve been involved in the crime. It is this very powerful Data Integration<\/a> and surveillance tool that can yield insights that might have previously taken hundreds of detectives on a case, or weeks or months, and of this shoe leather policing, and you can use it to narrow to shorten that down to minutes. Susan people listening might say that sounds like a good thing, use less police resources. So where is the problem . Sarah i think the issue lies in the sense that, in order for the system to work perfectly, we have to assume infallibility of the state. That the state never makes mistakes, and the inferences one draws about why you are in a place at a given time are unbiased and without error. And that everybody entering the data there is still a human side of Data Collection<\/a>, its not all automated but anybody who enters the information will do so without bias or error or prejudice, and that is just not borne out in ethnographic fieldwork. We have tons of information that suggests the data inputted in these police systems, for example, is as much a function of Law Enforcement<\/a> practices as it is actual ascending rates for actual offending rates. And we also have a lot of information that error is disproportionately distributed. There is a study out of michigan indicating that black folks are about seven times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than whites. In order to be ahead, if you think about dna databases, you have to be in the database in the first place. Part of the challenge with big data policing is so much of it is invisible and its hard to put your finger on exactly where the error comes in. Susan in other words, the Software Systems<\/a> being incorporated in the process support existing Police Practices<\/a> rather than a rethinking of how can we better police. Sarah yes, that is very well stated. Even though it runs counter to a lot of the Silicon Valley<\/a> rhetoric about these systems being totally disruptive and transformative, i think to a large extent, they reproduce existing Police Practices<\/a> under the veneer of objectivity. Susan i want to show our audience a commercial we found from 2012, from ibm, about predictive policing. Lets watch. [video clip] i used to think my job was all about arrests. Chasing bad guys. Now i see my work differently. We analyze crime data, spot patterns and figure out where to send patrols. It helps cities cut serious crime up to 30 . By stopping it before it happens. Lets build a smarter planet. Susan so sarah brayne, how does reliance on public companys and private vendors impact citizen s rights . Sarah i think the increased reliance on the private sector in public policing is fundamentally undermining some avenues for accountability within public agencies. This holds true in policing but also as you follow cases into the criminal Justice System<\/a>. Risk assessments are used in policing, but also in pretrial determination, in sentencing and even in Community Supervision<\/a> decisions as well. If you are unable to say why somebody has a high risk in a in a policing algorithm, or why someone has a high risk score in terms of childhood detention, that undermines what we call due process, the idea that everybody has a right to a fair trial. There is a certain amount of transparency required in order to have fairness of process and procedure. So when you have this increased role of the private sector and public policing, they can hide behind trade and secrecy agreements, saying we will not disclose the specifics of our algorithm because it is a trade secret and that type of thing, nondisclosure agreements, even if you submit public records requests. Sometimes its hard to determine what private companies are doing for Public Police<\/a> agencies, and this lack of transparency can undermine accountability and i think due process, ultimately. Susan to learn a little more about how predictive policing works, i want to spend more time on that, but you mention another software routinely used by quite a number of bigcity Police Department<\/a>s. How does it work . Sarah it is a placebased predictive policing algorithm, so essentially it takes three different types of input place, type, and time of crime, rating more recent crimes more heavily in the algorithm, and that is used to predict where crime is likely to occur in the future. It produces these 500 squarefoot boxes about the size of an intersection, and officers at the beginning of their shift are instructed to do datadriven appointments, basically to go to these boxes and check in and out and hopefully deter or intercept crime. That is the fundamental nature of predpol. It is one of the larger predictive policing softwares. There are others that use a data. Range of input predpol just has those types of three inputs. But others could use a range of data from demographic composition of an area to lots of different things. Sort of a kitchen sink model. Susan you write in your book that personbased or placed based predictions show the potential to reduce inequality , but as currently used, increases in equality appearing to be objective. In other words, a trojan horse. You mentioned chronic offender strategies. That is personbased predictive. How do they work, and how can they be applied unequally . Sarah within the department, they actually tried using the placebased predictive policing in order to predict Violent Crime<\/a> after they had started using it to predict property crimes, and found it wasnt very predictive. It wasnt working very well. They found they were focusing on the wrong unit of analysis. With placebased predictive crime,g, for properties they should focus on the locations. For Violent Crime<\/a>, the focus on the person. They adopted a strategy in lapd called operation laser. Within that strategy they created a ranked, ordered list of individuals according to their risk scores. The risk scores were calculated by giving folks five points if they are on parole or probation, five points for prior arrest with a handgun, five points for criminal history, and five points for gang affiliation. Then individuals were given one point for every Police Contact<\/a>. Every time the Police Stopped<\/a> them, they get an additional point added to their score. Then they are rank ordered according to the scores and chronic offender bulletins, these onepage bulletins that say your name, different addresses, people you are associated with, if you have any akas or gang aliases, all of your previous Police Contact<\/a>s. Essentially police are told, go out and stop these guys. It serves two functions. One is the ongoing intelligence gathering. You see where people are, who they are with and this type of thing. The second is to keep their risk scores high to further justify continually stopping them every day. This sort of can create a recursive loop or hidden feedback loop by which individuals have a high point score, they are stopped, that increases their point store, thus increasing the probability they will get stopped in the future. What is key is this becomes decoupled from actual criminal offending. These people are not wanted. There is no outstanding warrant for their arrest or anything, but they have risk scores that keep getting higher and higher because of ongoing Police Contact<\/a>. It is a selffulfilling prophecy or selfjustifying cycle that can happen. Susan as a sociologist, what happens to people with regular interactions being stopped when they havent committed a crime . Sarah there is a whole host of research on different things, sometimes called legal cynicism, lawabiding if you find the criminal Justice System<\/a> to be fair. For folks who are constantly getting stopped, even if they are not committing any crimes, this erodes the legitimacy of the system for them and makes them think it is not just the police that are unfair, but the state and government more broadly, and it can create this alienation and skepticism as well. There were some folks getting stopped upwards of four times a day, and that is really disruptive in your life, particular if youre trying to get on the straight and narrow and driving your kid around and you get stopped by the cops for times a day. It can be highly disruptive to your life. Susan we have a news clip from 2016, it is from new york city, about their program called comp stat. Is that very different from the programs used by lapd . Sarah its basically a precursor to predictive policing. It is a Management System<\/a> where you take different crime data and make different precinct commanders responsible for driving the metrics down and reducing crime. In particular areas. It is largely a precursor to predictive policing. It was bill bratton who was heading up the nypd who implemented it at the time, he actually introduced predictive policing to lapd years later. Susan lets watch the news story. [video clip] has to answer for a big jump in robberies and assaults. There are a lot of things going on, crime is not headed in the right direction. This is comstat. In front of 200 nypd commanders Carlos Valdes<\/a> explains what is , going right and faces a grilling about ongoing problems big and small. How are you doing with robbery, warrants . This is basic stuff. If you have a robbery issued, issue, everyone at the podium needs to be tuned in. Every monday we analyze, just like always, we analyze where the robberies are occurring and what time they are occurring and try to pinpoint locations. We are up almost 74 and in robbery arrest but that is not the goal, the goal is crime prevention. Susan what are you hearing as you see a Public Meeting<\/a> with Division Chiefs<\/a> being questioned in a public setting about Crime Statistics<\/a> in their area . Sarah basically i think what we are hearing is managerial oversight play out. Managers are asking commanders, why are your crime rates going up in this division . I see when i look at these metrics, you might have more arrests, but i care about crime rates going down and why are they not going down . It is essentially data being used as an accountability mechanism, and as a performance metric for evaluating Police Officers<\/a>s performance. Susan what is the reaction of the Law Enforcement<\/a> people you found in using these Software Systems<\/a> . Do they think it is a plus for the work they do . Sarah this is one of the unexpected parts of my fieldwork, i would say. When i went into the research, i was ambivalent about how lawenforcement might receive these tools. On the one hand, a lot of media portrayals, they portray lawenforcement like minority report, having voracious appetite for new technology to increase surveillance capacity. On the other hand, labor scholars would predict there would be resistance to these tools. Precisely as you mentioned, people feel like there is an entrenchment of managerial control, more oversight that plays out. On my first ride along, i got a little bit of insight into how it might be playing out in lapd. We pulled up to a vacant home, responding to a 911 call about a possible breakin. As we pulled up, the officer typed he was code6 and his in his laptop computer, meaning he had arrived. In that moment i got concerned because i thought to myself, i selected the lapd specifically because they were so technologically advanced, why does this guy have to manually input the location of his vehicle . I asked, is there not some sort of way of them centrally knowing where all the cars are . He said oh yeah, every vehicle is equipped with a locator that the location of the vehicle every five seconds, but they are not turned on because of resistance from the Police Officers<\/a> union. It was in that moment, it crystallized for me that data and technology are not some sort of inevitable or unbiased or objective tool. They are something that increases the power of some and decreases the power of others. When this technology was introduced in the context of policing in this case you had a , real division in how people reacted to it. People in managerial roles, roles with more oversight, they tended to embrace these tools because it allowed them to know not just where officers say they go, but where they actually go. It permitted an entrenchment of managerial control. They tended to embrace it, whereas the patrol officers tended to resist it, because they viewed it as the entrenchment of managerial oversight. Also importantly, it played a deskilling role as well, it eroded there professional autonomy. They would say things like i ive been out here for 20 years, i dont need an algorithm to tell me where to go, and what is an algorithm anyway . There was a lot of skepticism about the importance or the role, the opacity of algorithms. Susan when i read in your book about the policing, in their minds being a craft, not a science, i was thing about the debates that happened him again, after 9 11, with the increased use of data to predict terrorism and less reliance on people on the ground, and really knowing the communities they were observing. It sounds like there is a parallel situation going on here. Sarah there very much is. My fieldwork was taking place in the context as well of increased immigration enforcement, which local Law Enforcement<\/a> is not typically responsible for or technically responsible for. There was basically just growing mistrust in communities, particularly communities of color, about what the police were doing and why they were collecting information on them and what they would do and how they would intervene in their lives. You know, i think most of the officers i talked to were aware that still the most important tool in their kit is people on the ground being willing to talk to them and share information with them. At the end of the day, thats largely how you populate these databases, for example. But the extent to which it may be eroding that trust, particularly be eroding that particularly when you are rolling out new surveillance tools and technologies when civilians have not approved them, that can exacerbate a distrust that already existed in many communities. Susan the debate were having over policing, people are increasingly looking to data about Police Operations<\/a> rather than looking at citizens. To put some feedback into the system. Body cameras on Police Officers<\/a>, we have seen a lot of those after the shooting of a number of black citizens this year. Logs that are computerized and analyzed so they can know how me how many stops are happening. You say there is some resistance to the police being policed, in other words. And in fact, they are feeling that there are inequities on that side of it and bringing their own equipment along, their own cell phones. Talk about that aspect, which is that the data is backfiring for some of the police in the process. Sarah this is a really interesting phenomenon that is occurring, that you mentioned, where one of the accordance as of big data collecting as they is that it leaves digital trails and they are susceptible to oversight. Increasingly, data on where the police go and what they are doing is being recorded and can then can be used largely used within Police Department<\/a>s right now, for managerial oversight, for accountability and that type of thing. But there are calls for the public or external agencies to have more access to this data to be able to hold Police Department<\/a> accountable, like access to bodycam footage. I witnessed these fascinating practical strategies of resistance from officers themselves. Ranging from foot dragging, obfuscation, creating their own data that they have ownership of and think will tell a truer or more favorable story. For example, there are a bunch of automated recording systems that exist in police cars, so if you put someone in the backseat, you have a digital recording, that kind of thing. But some of the Police Officers<\/a> i went on ride alongs with, they have their own personal recorders in their pockets they would turn on and off because they did not trust the system. They did not trust it would exonerate them and prove they have not done anything wrong. Some of them were creating more data in order to protect themselves. Others were just avoiding the Data Collection<\/a> mechanism altogether. I saw officers using cell phones to call each other or text each other because they did not want to go through dispatch because dispatch has a record and dispatch records can be audited, for example. One example that is more crude, there was this antenna malfunction going on in one of the bureaus i was doing research in. It turns out the officers were just ripping the antenna off of their cars to prevent supervisors from hearing what they were saying in the field. Susan that suggest the officers dont trust the data being collected about them. Sarah there was a lot of mistrust, a lot of mistrust. Susan after Michael Browns<\/a> shooting, a task force was established in the Obama Administration<\/a> to look at policing. Lets listen to president obama talking about that task force. [video clip] we come to see the frustration in many communities of color and the feeling that our laws can be applied unevenly. After ferguson, i said we have to face these issues squarely. I convened a task force on community policing. In may, this task force, made up of Police Officers<\/a>, activists and academics, proposed 59 recommendations. Everything from how we can make better use of data and technology to help train police to how we train Police Officers<\/a>. Dozens of Police Officers<\/a> are sharing more data with the public, including on citations, stops and searches and shootings involving Law Enforcement<\/a>. The Justice Department<\/a> has begun pilot programs to help police use body cameras and collect data on the use of force. This fall, the department will award more than 162 million in grants to support Law Enforcement<\/a> and Community Organizations<\/a> working to improve policing. Susan what came of that effort . Sarah that was 2015, and as soon as trump was elected, he disbanded the task force. It does not exist anymore. That said, many of the Community Members<\/a>, grassroots organizers, academics, researchers and policymakers to a certain extent, that were interested in this, have continued to work, just without explicit federal government financial support. For example, you have this phenomenon of what some call stat activism. As obama mentioned, we did not have any sort of federal account of the number of People Killed<\/a> by police each year, for example. Now a number of nonprofits have started aggregating that information in order to have the first step of shedding light or transparency on particular Police Practices<\/a> in order to ultimately improve accountability in the administration of justice. Susan and again this year in the wake of george floyd and other killings in the United States<\/a>, there has been another big effort on Police Reform<\/a>. I want to show a clip from june 16 of this year, Georgia Republican<\/a> congressman bob barr talking about what democrats and republicans can come together on in the 2020 version of Police Reform<\/a> debate. [video clip] certainly on the issue of militarization and putting limits and scaling back the provision of military equipment to police, it is certainly something i think both sides could and should agree on. I think improving the moneys made available federally to support local police to increase, and superior training, is very important. I think providing money for much better recordkeeping for use is use of force is extremely important. These are some of the areas. Training, data keeping, do demilitarization included , both in republican proposals and democrat, that hopefully will provide basis for a bipartisan piece of legislation. Some of the more complex issues that i mentioned earlier, such as the onesizefitsall standard the democrats are proposing for use of force, i dont think are workable. Susan and in fact that legislation passed the house and had bipartisan votes on it, died in the senate. When congressman barr was talking about data keeping, thats just one side of the equation we have been discussing. The records that are keeping track of the police and their movements. Is the legislation as it has been debated in washington dealing with the issue you raised, which is increasing amounts of surveillance by private systems being incorporated into police recordkeeping . Is anyone talking about that . Sarah largely, not yet. There are potentially, there is potentially a bill that currently has some bipartisan support that is essentially limiting the scope of predictive policing tools. And that by definition, because many of the predicting policing softwares are developed privately, and are privately provided, that would start to do that. But no, i think largely these conversations are missing at this point, the increased private presence within public policing. In many ways, the private sector is not subject to the same type of transparency requirements. Sometimes it is falling outside the scope of these bipartisan efforts to increase fairness or accountability in policing. Susan from a constitutional perspective, it comes under the umbrella of the Fourth Amendment<\/a> rights to unreasonable search and seizure. Has there been important cases before the Supreme Court<\/a> that looked at these questions . Sarah they are starting to come to the Supreme Court<\/a>. As you mentioned the fourth , amendment protects us from unreasonable search and seizure. One of the issues at hand is what constitutes a search, what does a search look like . That is different today in the digital age than it was 100 years ago. It used to be that the police cannot come into your home without cause, rummage through your drawers and that kind of thing. What is the digital equivalent of rummaging through drawers . Is it ok if i look up your name in a host of different databases . Is that a search . Increasingly policing is suspicionless and databased rather than visceral invasive immediately present search. Sometimes it is difficult to understand or know the ways in which you are being surveilled. Some of the relevant cases that have come up carpenter would be the main one, that has to do with cell site location information, whether Law Enforcement<\/a> needs a warrant to access that kind of thing. Also, theres much more seemingly boring or benign cases. One of my favorites has to do with tire chalking. The idea is can an attendant mark on your tire where you were to prevent meter feeding . I think that also has to do with issues of locational privacy and that type of thing as well. Susan you tell us that society is at an Inflection Point<\/a> and certainly we are, we are having big debates about the role of policing in our communities. You are urging us to think big about the opportunities and consequences, the promises and perils of Data Collection<\/a> and deployment. What are you calling for and how should Society Debate<\/a> these issues and in what forum . Sarah i think, particularly the events of this summer, George Floyds<\/a> killing, they broaden the scope of what we are talking about when we are talking about changes in policing. Instead of focusing primarily on reform, there are conversations about defunding or shrinking or abolishing the police, fundamentally changing the institution of the police and what they do. Data is really being proffered in many ways as this sort of panacea or Silver Bullet<\/a> with many of these issues. In the defunding debate, lets say we are going to defund the defund the police and cut costs. People say data can be used to allocate resources more efficiently. Or lets reduce racial bias and officer decisionmaking. Lets automate it. Or you want to reduce the categorical suspicion of young black males and more accurately predict crime, try predictive algorithms. I think we need to be cautious here when using data, when we are trying to solve social problems with technological solutions. The first thing i would suggest in moving forward is that we take a moment to stop, to pause, and really invert the order of operations of what has been going on in the last 10 or so years. I think we need to stop the pattern of Law Enforcement<\/a> rolling out new Technology Without<\/a> any Community Buy<\/a> in or independent evaluation of its efficacy. A lot of these federally funded initiatives are for evidencebased policing. They occur before we have evidence of their efficacy. That brings me to a second recommendation, which is we should broaden the scope of the metrics of success, we need to redefine successful policing. As came up in that meeting, theres been a preoccupation with crime rates and that makes sense. Theres a whole host of other things we need to Pay Attention<\/a> to when we think about data. Is there increase of cases cleared by arrest, and decrease in the number of stops without arrest . Is there an increase or decrease in Racial Disparity<\/a> in stops without arrest or false arrests . Getting at the legitimacy issues, racial equality issues that lie at the heart of policing today and historically always have. I would also suggest there is something going on when we are talking about transforming policing, where if the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. In the policing context, we are using data to direct largely punitive interventions. I think if we are able to say within the United States<\/a>, the police are being called to respond to many things that they do not need to be present for, and might be better addressed by professionals or Community Members<\/a> trained in a different way. If we are able to use data to direct not just punitive resources but nonpunitive resources, we might be able to reduce some inequalities that are playing out. Susan there is a movie in 2002 that Steven Spielberg<\/a> directed called minority report, and it earns five citations in your book. I wanted to show people the trailer for that and we have about less than 10 minutes left. To sum this all up about the Inflection Point<\/a> society is at. [video clip] \\ what is coming . Double homicide, killer is male, white, mid 40s. Set up a perimeter and tell them en route. I am placing you under arrest for the future murder of sarah marx. The future can be seen. All we have to run on are the images they produce. We see what they see. There hasnt been a murder in six years. There is nothing wrong with the system, it is perfect. Murder can be stopped. Tell me exactly what it is you are looking for. Do we get any false positive . We are arresting individuals that have broken no law. But they will. The fact you prevented from happening doesnt change the fact that it was going to. Run. Susan how far from reality is that 2002 Science Fiction<\/a> movie . Sarah we are kind of far from that. The reason it comes up so much in the book is not really because im trying to analogize predictive policing to minority report, but because it is the public presumption of what is going on is. Whenever i give a talk, people are like, this is minority report. People are not being arrested for precrimes. However, i think what is happening is data is being used to create categories and scores of suspiciousness of people. Law enforcement treats folks differently depending on how suspicious they are or arent, how suspicious a particular area is, how at risk to crime an area is paired one of the most consequential Law Enforcement<\/a> positions is where to go to look for crime. We are clearly using predictive policing to predict certain types of crime, street crime. We are not using predictive policing to predict financial crime. The hotspots are not in new york on wall street, for example. These are very social decisions about which crimes we want to prioritize, and it tends to be street crime as opposed to whitecollar crime. I think we are kind of far from it in some ways, but a lot of times what i would do in my interviews is i would ask my interviewee to imagine or fantasize where they would be in five or 10 years and terms of police use of data and technology. That is really where a lot of the minority report stuff came up. They would say things like i can imagine if i was driving down the street, going to serve somebody an arrest warrant and the windshield of my vehicle would be like google glass, i see there is a registered firearm in this house, there is a sex offender in the house, someone with an outstanding warrant. They would be bombarded with all of this information. This is the minority report world. While it has not really played out yet, i do think these public imaginarys can be powerful, particular in moments like right now, where we are trying to reimagine and reinvent policing. Susan as we close out, i would like to raise some objectives objections people listening to you might be saying. For example, crime rates are down, technology is obviously making me safer. How would you respond to that . Sarah i think the causal relationship between enforcement practices and crime rates is very heavily contested. There is a whole bunch of things responsible for crime rates, and we can look to the 1990s and early 2000s as one of the emblematic cases of this. Policing is on a many things one of many things that impacts crime rates. It is way too simplistic a story to say the introduction of these new technologies causally impacts crime rates going down. It could be a host of other things from Economic Conditions<\/a> to changes in the drug trade. Susan another objection could be i am a lawabiding citizen, why should i be concerned about Data Collection<\/a> . Sarah absolutely, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear logic. One of the responses i would say to that is first of all, again, it relies on the assumption of the infallible state, so you have to be fully confident that all Police Officers<\/a>, all lawyers, all state actors are never going to make a mistake or unfair decisions about you because you will not be able to push back on any of it because you will not know why these things occurred because it is all shrouded in opaque algorithms. And secondly would be this idea of, do we believe there is any inherent value in privacy . Right now im more than happy to be having these discussions with you, but if you ask me to say my Social Security<\/a> number on air even though i fully trust you as a person, i wouldnt want to do that. I think theres value in me having that information be private and that is being eroded as well. You tell us the law has not kept up with the advance of technology. As you embark on your book tour, what is the one thing you would like to see happen as a result of the work you have been doing . Sarah as a researcher, i see my role as shedding light on the technological processes but also social processes of how the police are using big data. I would really like to do my work and pull back the veil, reduce the amount of secrecy so that different people can do with it what they will. Community groups can do with it what they will come up policymakers can do with it what they will. At least reduce the imbalance or the information asymmetry, where civilians dont know what the police are doing with big data. This is my way of contributing some sort of transparency in the practice is playing out on the ground. Susan sarah brayne is an assistant professor of sociology at ut austin and the author of a new book called predict and surveilled. Predict and surveille thank you for spending an hour with cspan talking about police use of big data. Sarah thank you. [captions Copyright National<\/a> cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] all q a programs are available on our website, or as a podcast, on cspan. Org. Both chambers of congress are in session this week. The house starts at 2 00 p. M. Eastern today to consider a number of veterans related bills. Later in the week, the measure to strengthen faa oversight in the wake of crashes involving boeing 737 Max Airplanes<\/a> and resolution condemning china for violating human rights in hong kong. , selectoruse floor leadership with top positions running unopposed. The senate is back at 3 00 p. M. Eastern to consider a judicial nomination for the Southern District<\/a> of mississippi with a vote to advance the nomination scheduled for 5 30 p. M. Eastern. Sheldonnation of judy to serve on the Federal Reserve<\/a> board of governors. Watch the house of representatives live on cspan and the senate live on cspan two. Journal, on washington bob cusack, editorinchief of the hill newspaper, looks at how the election will impact the next congress. Marcus the chief medical officer of the association of state and Territorial Health<\/a> officials talks about statelevel efforts to combat covid19 and plans to distribute an eventual vaccine. We will also take your calls and you can join the conversation on facebook and twitter. Washington journal is next. Good morning everyone. As President Trump<\/a> and president elect joe biden continue to work on a response to the covid19 pandemic, cases are on the rise. We will begin this morning with your thoughts on the pandemic and what it is like where you live. U. S. Deaths have increased to more than an average of 1000 today. An additional 47 to dine the next month according to the cdc. 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