zlacker

>>colawa+(OP)
Am I misunderstanding something here or does this imply that up until now the city of NYC did not have full access and transparency concerning the capacities of the NYPD?

How is this even a thing? I don't know much about the US political system but how is it that the police is not entirely subjected to civic government and why does a law need to be passed to control what the NYPD does?

>>Barrin+Dq
You can't scrutinize what you don't know about. So every bit of transparency has been hard-fought.

Take the NYPD's use of proprietary "predictive policing" algorithms to identify where a crime may occur and identify individuals who may be a perpetrator.

These algorithms have long been feared to express the biases of their input data. [1]

The NYPD has obstructed freedom of information requests at every turn. They wouldn't even release their correspondence with the vendor because it "would reveal trade secret information." [2]

If we can't examine it or even know how it's being used, it's significantly more difficult to scrutinize.

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...

[2]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/cour...